Last night saw us hit our fastest speeds of the race so far. Lying in 5th position we decided we had little to lose by pushing as hard as we could. With boatspeeds surging to over 40 knots and averages in the low to mid twenties we thought we might make some gains on somebody ahead.

Sadly this fleet is so strong that the best we could offer still saw us losing a little to the leaders. It appears that nobody has had any breakdowns enough to slow them down and everybody is pushing just as hard as us! Despite all the crashing and banging we seem in reasonable shape as far as we can tell. We have just slowed down a tough for 20 minutes to change out a steering cable that was showing signs of wear. A broken cable would not be much fun at these high speeds. If everyone stays in one piece it looks like the race will be decided tonight by whoever gybes in the best position – getting the gybe in 40+ knots is not going to be easy either. Life onboard isn’t much fun right now. Eating and sleeping are both hard but we can console ourselves with the thought that all being well we should be in L’Orient tomorrow.