Mixed Blessings

We're currently pottering along with 3,659 miles to go until Victoria, with blue skies, sunshine and a brisk breeze. Fairly much perfect sailing conditions in fact, and one of those days that make you remember why you signed up for the whole thing. Strange to think how different things were 24 hours ago; Easter Sunday was a catalogue of disasters, not least due to the conspicuous absence of any chocolate bearing Easter bunny.

5am; I'm on watch, but we're running a split system because it's so cold on deck. Offer to make everyone a hot drink, and promptly spill a mug of boiling water over my hand. Now have an appealing patch of blisters covered by a bandage that I'm not meant to get wet... hmm, that’s going to be easy on a racing yacht in the middle of the Pacific.

10am; We hoist the medium weight kite. This is the one that ripped in half on the run up to Qingdao, and subsequently had three days spent on it being repaired. Five minutes later, with only 9 knots of wind, the whole thing shreds into small pieces. Collective crying from the crew.

11pm; I'm below decks working on repairing the stay sail (which ripped in two a week ago). Hear shouting on deck and crashing as the boat lurches from side to side. We’ve been hit by a squall, the helm has accidentally gybed, and the traveller system has broken (which is the bit that holds the main sail to the deck via the boom). We now have an unattached boom sweeping backwards and forwards across the deck, and the ten foot stretch of metal that was previously the traveller swinging by one end in front of the helm. It takes us three hours to lash the traveller down, drop the sails, rerun the rigging, rehoist a smaller sail, all in screaming winds and rain. Not a particularly fun night, and one that won't help us move out of our current low position.

In the meantime, Jersey have diverted back to Japan to mend a broken forestay (that'll be the one that was meant to have been fixed in Cape Town five months ago) and Qingdao have met up with a patrol boat to offload a crew member with a dislocated shoulder. So things could be worse...

Days 1-5

We were expecting a gentle run in of a couple of days downwind sailing in about 15knots. What we got was upwind Force 8s and 9s (35+knots) and two days of headsail changes and deckwork in howling bitingly cold winds and rain.

Our staysail tore in half on day 2, and is currently occupying most of the saloon as we attempt a repair. Luckily my Scopoderm patches appear to be doing a magic job of fending off sea sickness, and my drysuit has been a godsend, even if I do have to be physically stuffed into it by the time I've put all my midlayers on (imagine a 5foot 4in michelin man...).

Today and yesterday have seen lighter winds and a chance to get the spinnaker back up, the boat to dry out a little, and crew to catch up slightly on sleep and changes of clothes.

I'm on mother watch today, which has proved less chilled out than usual; the routine of spinnaker up, spinnaker down, yankee up, yankee down that is becoming unpleasantly familiar meant that watches were late off deck and we didn't get breakfast finished until 11.30. Just in time to start lunch for 12.30, which wasn't finished until 2pm, at which point there were the toilets to clean, the boat to anti-bac, and the bilges to pump out.

Still, a full nights sleep last night was good, tho' didn't make up for the disappointment of finding out that we don't have enough water for showers at the moment - there's only so much you can do with a packet of wet wipes!

Race 7

Race 7 is an epic 5,600 miles from China to Victoria across the Pacific, with our only points of reference being a waypoint to the south of Japan that we have to leave to port, and an upper limit of 48 degrees, which whilst it stops us following the great circle route (which is the quickest), also keeps us relatively out of harms way south of the Aleutian Islands.

Expectations are that it'll be tough; cold heavy weather, lots of wear and tear on the boat, and the challenge for crew of managing tiredness and health sufficiently to be able to pull their weight.

Qingdao

None of us knew what to expect from our Chinese stopover, and in the end it was probably both more and less than we'd imagined.

On the one hand, Qingdao is a large industrialised city, 7 million inhabitants, and all the standard facilities you'd expect. On the other, Chinese culture can seem impenetrable to outsiders - the crew of Singapore who complained about being overcharged by a taxi driver probably didn't expect him to be tracked down using CCTV and sacked...

The city put on a great prize giving dinner for us, complete with Chinese acrobats, dragon dancers and Tsing Tao beer drinking competition, and the crew found a regular evening drinking haunt at the aptly named New York bar.

A bit of maintenance, a deep clean, a chance to repair the kite meant we only got a solitary day off which wasn't really enough to recover from the efforts of the previous three weeks and most of the crew seemed to pick up coughs and colds just in time for our next departure. Ellen McArthur arrived mid-week as a stop in her Asia record circuit attempt, with her trimaran B&Q making the clippers look like ten little Skodas sat next to a Porsche.

And then just 5 days after our arrival, we were off again, with 5,600 miles to go before next landfall.

Race 6

Race 6 started in a blur of crew discontent, soon forgotten as the jostling for positions on the leaderboard took over. New York spent most of the race ricocheting from one end to the other; first in one schedule quickly followed by tenth in the next as we sat in a wind hole off the coast of Taiwan for 24 hours. The Taiwanese coast guard came over for a chat, suggested that they escort us out of territorial waters, and then quickly gave up on that idea when they realised that as we had less than a knot of boat speed, not only would they miss their dinners but probably also their weekend plans.... Could things get worse? Yes. Yours truly was standing trimming the medium weight kite when all of a sudden it just split in two - a stunned moment of thinking "I'm sure I shouldn't be able to see sky through the middle" was followed by an all hands on deck effort to recover the pieces. The next week was spent doing a billion and one sail changes, and picking our way through endless fleets of Chinese fishing boats, all lit up at night like little fairground attractions. Then just when we thought we'd made it, the final five miles into the finish line produced zero wind and a hellish run of fishing nets.

So, in summary we came in 7th, with a shredded spinnaker and a tired crew.. That said tho', we all felt as if we'd raced really well as a team, and if it hadn't been for the vagaries of the weather should have been placed higher, but hey, that's the whole thing about sailing. Onwards and upwards.