Another fantastic night sail last night as we cleared the Doldrums and set off blasting across the trades with the spinnaker up. How often do you get to sail boats as fantastic as these at their fastest angle for 2000 miles downwind dressed in shorts and T shirt? ‘Not very’ is the answer! The race is developing into two great battles. Puma, Telefonica and Camper at the head of the pack and ourselves neck and neck with Groupama.

Groupama have sailed up high overnight and gained some bearing on us but we are happy to have some distance between the boats at this stage. Being further south will hurt in the short term but maybe it will be an advantage in a couple of days time. The weather ahead looks very mixed and there still remains every possibility that the fleet will park up in light wind between here and Miami.

Until then we need to try to stay as close as we can to the lead pack and hope something opens up for us. In other news, it s a great disappointment that we haven’t had any rain yet. There are 11 very smelly men onboard Azzam desperately in need of a shower and the shower gel has been on deck in readiness for days. Conversation onboard is fixed largely on the ETA into Miami which is fluctuating by up to 48 hours, food rationing and whether we will run out of diesel or not. I am confident we will be alright on all fronts but we are in ‘power save’ mode and the already sparse daily rations have been thinned down a bit more to create some food for Tuesday and Wednesday. At least we can be confident there will be no shortage of food in Miami!