After an uneventful  night, the 6 till 9 shift managed to pack in enough activity to make up for the previous 6 hours of relatively plain sailing. The sea was pretty choppy and the wind kept picking up until a big wave coupled with a heavy gust flipped us round, causing the spinnaker to wrap around the forestay. We’re obviously slowly starting to transform into a reasonably decent crew, because almost as soon as a volley of swearing from the deck had followed the jerk of the boat being flipped round, the inert snoring bundles from the bunks below were transformed into active, if rather bleary eyed hands on deck helping to try and untangle the mess. Luckily, some shrewd tugging by Ewan managed to get the spinnaker free, but it was obvious that we’d need to put a reef in the main or start saving up for a new sail. Even with the reef things still kept hotting up until we had to drop the spinnaker entirely, sailing on the reefed main alone.

Things then quietened down for a bit, leaving us to admire a beautiful sunrise. Like a huge guillotine, heavy grey clouds bore down almost to the horizon behind us, and in the gap that was left, the burning orange of the sunrise seemed even more intense for being forced out from under the weighty clouds.  Up ahead, a pastel blue sky fronted by white cumulus clouds seemed to promise another lovely day.

There was little time for reveries over the sunrise though, as the winds dropped and it was back up with the spinnaker and shaking out the reef in the main. By the time we’d got everything shipshape it was nearly 10, and Jem and Jens (who were officially only on from 6 till 9) were already grumbling about overtime rates.

The promised lovely day failed to materialise; what did though were two large grey squalls loitering with what was obviously ominous intent on the horizon. We kept hoping they’d miss us, but it was largely wishful thinking as the bigger one was soon on top of us and emptying its ample load of rain over us. You learn to take advantage of these things however, so almost as soon as the rain started, there was a grimy looking bunch of crew stood under it with shower gel and rubber ducks at the ready.

The weather improved as the day progressed and the sun beat down for the rest of the afternoon, but there was still a reasonably heavy swell; one rogue wave riding clean up over the port side of the boat and crashing down into the cockpit. As soon as we heard the yelp and stream of cursing from below, we saw that someone had left the hatch over the starboard bunk open. Shortly afterwards Paul clambered up from the hatch completely soaked, and dripping water from head to toe. This might have provided a source of some amusement were it not for the fact that he emerged carrying most of our bedding in his arms, all of it in a similarly hydrated state to the one he was in. Even after several hours of frantically waving the sheets in the wind, it looks like most of us are going to have a rather damp night.