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From : Sarah Brice
Yacht : Concert
Date : SUNDAY 18th MAY
Once again it seems to be down to 5 boats out at the front of the fleet as we head towards the Equator. We're fairly spread out at the moment, but with gybes that take us either north or west we may well encounter each other again. We spent several days playing cat and mouse with Commercial Union, watching them on radar yo-yo between 4 and 6 miles ahead. We broke off and headed west in the end, to go for a better longitude to cross the Doldrums. The miles gained and lost on position reports seem random, but reflect which gybe yachts have been on - the gybe to the north gets us nearer Boston, but the other gybe takes us further west and hopefully gives us an advantage later. We plot the positions on the chart in different colours for each yacht, to follow progress. Today we've moved on to the leg 1 chart that has the routes down to Rio. Seems a hell of a long time ago. Soon we'll be crossing our track and "tying the knot" - we'll have sailed round the world!
The next decider will be the lottery of the Doldrums, which will split the fleet further. Soon we'll have the graph paper out and be plotting the forcasted Doldrum boundaries, trying to spot a pattern and hit them at the most advantageous place. How much this is effective science and how much it simply makes us feel better is open to debate!
So for now we're enjoying the longer, sunny days and shorter nights, although the temperature is getting seriously toasty in the middle of the day. But after the Southern Ocean, we promised we wouldn't complain! Odd not to have seen any of the seasons this year. No trees changing colour, no spring etc. We'll just turn up back in the UK and slot in almost where we left off. But then, I think we've seen enough surrogate winter to last several years!
Entertained still by stunning night sky and even saw the famous comet. Gazed at it through the binoculars and it looked just out of a textbook. Groovy. Daytime entertainment has moved to opening a foredeck hair salon. I'm going blonde. Well, haven't yet, but waiting for the effects of the sun and a few chemicals. May turn out green. Spice Girl fever taken to extremes, perhaps!
Yours, having fun in the sun, Sarah.
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