Race 12 - Day 8
Crew Diary - New York, USA to Derry-Londonderry, Northern Ireland
28 June

The weather has been fantastic today.

Tiger watch went up on deck at 6am New York Time, which is 10am UTC, 11am BST, midday in France and probably about 8am in mid Atlantic. Before I even came out of the hatch I realised I was over dressed and went straight back down to shed long trousers, jacket and merino shirt, socks and shoes.

When I did get up on deck in shorts t-shirt, bare feet, sun hat, specs gallons of sun cream and, of course my life jacket the first job was trimming the spinnaker. We are slowly making our way North East alongside the virtual beach that we are not allowed to cross (icebergs may be there) with a following wind fluctuating between 3 and 10 knots.

The first thing I saw as I took the trim was a large black fin sticking out of the water right beside the edge of the boat where I was standing. The noise of me saying "shark" must have frightened him as he just slowly sank below the surface. For the last few days we have been seeing little dark blobs with beautiful pink fans on top of their backs floating by. We have no idea what they were and made up all sorts of names (spinnaker fish...) until Bob told us they are Portuguese Men of War. So definitely no swimming happened today.

All watches seem happy and relaxed in the sunshine and enjoying a nice flat boat. The heads are both fixed although the crew computer is still down.

All is good on Qingdao expect AJS is telling me there is not enough wind!

Sarah