Why? Why? Why?
Everyone back at home must be wondering what on earth we are thinking of - hour by hour we have been losing ground to the rest of the fleet, and you would be forgiven for assuming that we have well and truly taken our eye off the ball. In fact, we are not holed away down below drinking rum and living it up; the pressure on deck has never been greater.
Just a few hours ago we rounded Waypoint Bravo in third - which is another of our objectives for the leg achieved (three cheers) - but the lead we held on to for so long has
slipped from our grasp. Well, the simple answer is that we are just as bewildered as our supporters must be by our apparent lack of form. We have been beating our brains, trying to work out what has been going wrong, and last night, with all other possibilities discounted, we decided to sail backwards for a while. Hove to, we attached the foreguy to the main and headed stern first for Australia. At the back of our minds had been the nagging suspicion that something was caught around the keel. There have been so many huge banks of kelp floating our way that this seemed a real possibility - and at night they are unavoidable. Whether or not there was anything there in need of dislodging time will tell, but for now David appears to be uninspired by the raft of treats which we will enjoy today in celebration of reaching the Kerguelen Islands.
At 6am boat time (1am GMT), the off-going watch was treated to a cooked breakfast of hash browns, beans, bacon and egg (dehydrated of course), all washed down with a drop of Jameson's, and later we have our champagne and crunchie bars. It is bittersweet though, we have to admit. We just cannot fathom it. Nothing has changed in terms of the way we do things, but we feel like we are trying to run through mud. At least the wakes of Spirit of Sark and Imagine It. Done. (7.5 and 15.9 miles in front respectively) give us a real goal to focus on. We had begun to suspect that the waypoint existed in some other dimension, so slow was it in coming; but we know for sure that they are out there and we are heading their way as fast as we can.
There are 2,497 miles to go to Cape Town and the fat lady is not singing yet!
Naomi Cudmore
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