The wind forecast for today was pretty much as expected and so we kept up the parasail over night and gained around 80 miles in 24 hours on most of our direct competitors. The combination of the fast hulls, aft dart keels and forward helm allowed us to be confident and secure when sailing fast with the big sail.

Today was a nice start to the day with a quiet night and lower winds. The sea state was much calmer and despite the night watches we all got more sleep.

We are pleased to have escaped the worst of the weather to the North of us – it was unpleasant for us and I hope the others aren’t being battered too much! We are now in much lower wind strengths but with quite a lot of swell running.

We had a blustery night with winds up to 35 knots at midnight. The sea was lumpy and then it started to rain, heavily! This isn’t the transatlantic trade wind sailing I signed up for!

The wind has dropped a bit now and the wind is warming up. We have now untangled the asymmetric on the deck and we have got it set and pulling. We’ve been running the engine a bit whilst we have bene downwind but now the asymmetric is flying we don’t need to.

First couple of days produced some seasickness within the crew (mostly the skipper) but that’s cleared now and we are making good progress. The wind is astern, as predicted, but the issues with the asymmetric spinnaker before we left means that we are trying to sail down wind with the upwind sails  – not very effective.