41' 55S 39' 27E

This time next week we will, hopefully, be busily dragging out the mooring lines and fenders which for the past five weeks have been consigned to the lazarette. (A storage locker at the aft of the yacht behind the wheel -Ed.) Very soon now we will be dropping the mainsail, donning our green t-shirts and, perhaps, the men will be scraping off their Southern Ocean beards before meeting their loved ones again (at least we hope so, for their sake!)

For now, though, we are ploughing into the beginnings of our final gale, which is set to build over the next 12 hours. We had a mini-gale yesterday, followed by a calm, so the sail-change teams have been making that trip up to the foredeck time and time again over the last 24 hours or so. Sleeping the sleep of the dead in between each tiring shift, we are counting down the hours to the arrival of some southerly winds which look set to take us screaming all the way to Cape Town with the kites up. Fingers crossed that we do not get caught in the notorious 'parking lot' in sight of Table Mountain, where windless bubbles often see yachts parked up and eeking their way inch by painful inch towards that longed-for pint. This said, if the familiar piece of bungee that is once again stretched between ourselves and Spirit of Sark does not make a decided pull in our direction soon, it may be that flukey winds and light airs could well work in our favour as we approach the finish. We are doing all we can to chip away at the distance between ourselves and the lead boats - not without some success - but as soon as we have picked away another couple of miles, they seem to pull away from us once again; Imagine it. Done. currently lying at a distance of 35 miles and Spirit of Sark just under half that at 16.5.

It is hard to think of any celebration now except the finish and hopefully a podium one), but we do have the 1,000-mile barrier to the waypoint to cheer about later today - truly the beginning of the end. Plus (if we can remember where we hid it), there is a bottle of Jura single malt to enjoy once we have left the Roaring Forties behind us for good; perhaps this will be a good time to reflect on just how far we have come and what we have achieved since our first tentative team training sail together last spring. It feels like a lifetime ago!

Naomi Cudmore