Current position "24:49.3N 19:08.2W". The attached pics show Clearlake II heading into the sunset last night, followed by one of our competitors on the horizon, silhouetted by the evening sunset. Finally you see James at the helm this morning – we had 11.0 knots as our peak speed while Graham was helming, but around the time of this pic we hit 11.8 knots; fabulous sailing conditions providing we don’t break anything. Speaking of which, as we wrote this there were a couple of shouts from up top, and we decided to take the spinnaker down before we tore it; so now it’s safely down and we are on a broad reach with mainsail and genoa. Last night was a mix with strong winds, which eventually (about 11 pm) convinced us to take the spinnaker down to keep it safe and then rather slight winds in the middle of the night, coming up again this morning.

 

For those of you tracking us on the ARC fleet viewer, grateful any feedback on the range of routes being taken by others of similar size and how they’re faring. We received our race positions today – again it’s a jumble of Lat/ Lon positions which we’d have to plot out to work all out, and we don’t have time for – too much stuff going on! What we do know is that we’re lying second in Cruising Class B. [The whole cruising division (which is most of the fleet) is split up into classes based on similar handicaps. The highest handicaps are generally the fastest boats – and would be in Class A, then the next class B, and so on to Class H. There are 17 in our class]. So that’s good news. The leader is a Dufour 45, the more racing version of our boat, but it only has a slightly different handicap (who understands why!) – so I think they have a natural advantage, but let’s see what we can do in the next couple of days.

 

Finally, Graham commissioned the aft shower hose this morning – having a shower (or sprinkle might be a better description as we need to conserve water) standing on the step at the back of the boat while travelling at 9-10 knots is exhilarating; there’s lots of incentive to hang on! This also involved cleaning some clothes at the same time (a bit of soap and then trampling on them). These are now hanging from our saloon clothes line inside!

 

So all working well so far, and nothing broken – equipment or, more important, people. Our next serious target is a couple of hundred nm NE of the Cape Verde islands, but that’s about 600 nm away or 4 days or so i.e. Saturday plus/ minus, all assuming my sextant-based navigation holds up and we don’t end up in South Africa(!), but so far so good...