It’s been some of the best sailing we’ve had in the whole circumnavigation over the past 48 hours. Amazing surfs, nice strong winds and of course the occasional squall to give us all a nice freshwater shower.
The sun has been out, we’ve had amazing cloudless and moonless nights, letting the stars shine like you just can't get anywhere else other than the middle of an ocean, and the Milky Way is a bright belt across the sky. The crew and ourselves have just been soaking in as much as we can. It’s a bittersweet feeling, knowing that this is the last ocean crossing and penultimate race of the circumnavigation. Whilst we are all quite tired after ten months of racing, we’re all still loving it and could quite happily keep going if given the opportunity. Also only adding to the sentiment, as of three hours ago we crossed the most westerly point we went to in Uruguay, meaning our round the worlders, Ryan and I have technically circumnavigated! Although we are holding off the celebrations until we officially circumnavigate by crossing our track and getting safely back into Portsmouth.
Although we’ve been enjoying the sailing, our southerly route isn’t quite paying off as much as we had hoped. The currents haven’t been as strong as expected so we haven’t quite pulled back as much as we'd hoped. There is another very strong bit that we’ll be heading into in the next 12 hours so that should give us another boost but were still only a third of the way into the race and the fleet is still quite compressed so still very much all to play for.
Charlie, Ryan and the DTL team