The last few days have been intense. Regarding the race we have been doing great. The distance to the boats ahead has been reduced, while we could increase our lead over the boat behind us. Overall we are very pleased with our performance.

This has been possible due to strong northerly winds. This allowed us to make good speeds with the undamaged rudder in the water. In addition to the fast sailing conditions the northerly winds brought a drop in temperature. Thus it is getting very cold on deck, especially during the night. We have thus implemented a rotation system which allows everyone to get some time below deck to warm up instead of having to stay on deck for the entire watch.

Apart from the cold winds we also had some rain. However, what was more uncomfortable was the cold spray. In particular in the pitch black nights you could not see it coming and it would hit you right in the face. Together with the wind the face then gets very cold as neither the air nor the water temperature is above ten degrees centigrade. The face then goes numb just like after a good peeling.

Meanwhile the wind has come around and now blows from the east. That’s exactly where we want to go. This makes it a bit harder for us to maintain our position. When beating against the wind we are half of the time with only the broken rudder in the water. We then only progress more slowly as we have to limit our sails to stay in control of the boat.

Furthermore, today one of our two toilets broke and is leaking when you try to flush it. As a result we now get a queue in front of the other one at every watch change. At this time the other watch is also replacing our main sail sheet block, as the bearing has gone. This makes it unnecessarily hard to trim the sail as the block no longer spins.

But even those setbacks will not stop us. We maintain a good spirit on board and will continue to do our best to reach the finish line and Seattle as quickly as possible. To get there we still have to cover about 1500 nautical miles with hopefully less unpleasant surprises. And if the temperatures went up a little I don’t think anyone would complain.