23' 03S 4' 25E

Yesterday was a good day, the boat was powered up, we were in the right place tactically, all the numbers on the schedules looked good and the weather was clear. As a skipper this results in a very pleasant feeling. All is well in your world, its easy to sleep, and when you awake to more good news from the schedules, its easy to joke with the crew and praise their efforts.

Today is a tense day... Overnight we/I agonised about whether to drop the genoa and bear away and raise the 1.5oz race kite. Do we, don't we? Have the others? You get the crew to set up the spinnaker and pole and then change your mind and hold the situation. You can't sleep, you have a nagging feeling that things aren't going well and six hours later the schedules come in. '' the boats to the east have made some big gains on us'' is the gloomy analysis from the navigator. Your fears are confirmed. Finally the wind falls into a shape that you are comfortable with the kite goes up and some form of parity with the others in the race is achieved.

Looking at the schedules you see that for the next 18hours we are in a vulnerable position on the inside line of the high waiting for the winds to fill and the next stage of the race to take shape.

As a skipper I find that you are often in this kind of situation and it is the hardest part of the job for me. You can't just do what everybody else is doing all the time. But unfortunately I have not cracked the art of being right all the time either. We are more often right than wrong or we wouldn't be consistently up the front. Dealing with the days like to today is the real challenge of skippering a boat.

We are sailing slowly and there is a likelihood that the boats to the east will be/ could be sailing faster. There is six hours between knowing what everybody is doing and finding out via the schedules. Its tempting to sit like a bear with a sore head, or roam the boat making observations about how
the crew might sail the boat faster. But the crew hate this and have told me at numerous debriefs. It has often proved a mistake to voice my concerns to crewmembers as this seems to have a bigger negative effect on their morale than the positive effect on my own! So like bosses the world over you have to put on a positive face, squash down the feeling that the race is disappearing over the horizon and practice logical thought control.

What we have lost we shall regain. Being down only brings the crew down. We know how to sail the boat and have proved it time over. Get on deck and be positive.

Well I'm glad I've got that off my chest I feel better now!

N.B For those that don't realise we are supplied with the position of all the boats in the fleet every 6 hours. These are know as 'the schedules'. I often think of this constant 6 hours analysis of the situation (every day for 35 days) as ''the tyranny of the schedules''. Pre satellite, yachts in ocean races might learn of positions once a week or at best once a day. Or in some cases by waiting in the bar at the finish and seeing who turned up next!