19' 55S 0' 34E

We are one week in and it seems to have flown by which is good. We have seen our position go from right at the back at the start, to being first a couple of days ago, to being in sixth now. But this has not sent us spiralling into self-doubt, far from it, everything is going smoothly and confidence is high. David's log on Friday is an excellent insight into what makes a skipper tick, well our skipper anyhow. It is poignant he should mention how well he sleeps as a measure of how well we are doing. In contrast, " Crew sleep, what a wonderful thing" he said. "That sleep where you've got to the end of your watch and it's up to the other watch to look after things now". I'd not thought about it that way before but it's true. It's true as long as we've done everything we can during our watch to make the boat go faster and hand over to the new watch knowing that there is nothing left undone, no mess to sort out, no extra work for them to regain lost miles. Knowing that we have done everything we can is the key to the inner calm and a good 'crew sleep'. We have made some significant advances since those testing few weeks at the start of the first leg. To say we can almost do manoeuvres blindfold would not be too much of an exaggeration. To aid the helms and to retain our night vision we have be doing a lot of things on deck at night in near darkness. It is much safer now that the yacht is more level and we have developed a routine that works, a routine that has become second nature. Much like our attitude to safety a lot of the things we do are becoming habit - continually reviewed and checked to avoid complacency - but habit.

There are too many reds on the positions screen (yachts in front of us) and as we sailed along the middle track the yachts either side got the better of us. But things, we hope, are set to equal themselves out a bit soon. We are in a constant head to head battle with Spirit of Sark, which sees us crossing paths on a regular basis and we are also taking miles out of the leaders so we should be able to work our way up through the positions again. We just need the weather on our side or at least to present a level playing field.

As we enter week two we are just going to continue as we have been doing. There is in fact a lot of positive energy onboard. At the end of the day David and the watch leaders have the most pressure but as I write this log (at 4am) David and Cop are sleeping soundly and we hope Olly and our watch will when we get off at 6.

PS. To Gabi's friend Cenira, thank you for your kind words about my logs. Always appreciated.