“It has been calm winds and few miles since Las Palmas put up a great show in seeing us off. With a brass orchestra, a cheerful crowd and an Airforce flyover bidding us farewell, Challenger1 crossed the starting line gracefully almost in tune with the deafening cannon blast of the naval battleship sent to salute us.

And as I had wished for before departure, good ol’ Neptun portly welcomed us to his world sending a school of bowriding dolphins eager to put up quite a display before nightfall!

We are now well into day four and I must say that our wind tactician has played an excellent opening game, which now puts us ahead of Challenger 4. But with the average age on our boat almost double theirs, what else would you expect but calm reasoning, paired with cold blooded gybing and superb helming enhanced with refined spinnaker handling! Both Port & Starboard watch – well done!!

Following Napoleon’s motto that “only a hungry soldier is a good soldier”, our boat is kept under a slightly tighter regime than the average QE2 passenger. Also the amount of creativity put into combining edibles commands respect – but maybe that is simply my continental palate speaking. (I’ve got a feeling that our chef secretly read this last night, as this morning’s breakfast was quite lavish for a change!)

To add to our menu we stuck out the fishing rod and eventually got something biting just in the middle of a gybing manoeuvre. All hands to the rod instead of all hands on the spinnaker must have appeared an act of mutiny to our skip. Anyhow, our attempt to put a bit of Sashimi on our plates was marred by loosing the battle between man & beast – score’s 0:1 now. But this is a long game!

If someone could now pass me the sun lotion and the Colada!
… o.k., the sun screen has to do for the moment.

Happy sailing & happy birthday Gunnar!”

Stefan on day four at 12:00 board time just touching the 24th parallel