Scoring Gates and First Shower

Jamaica lime green - 25 April 13:30

Here's an update from Jelte, sneakily copied from Clipper's crew diaries which you can read here.

Mother Duties

Well all I can say is thank god for Magdalena (Legs 6 and 7) my bunk buddy and thus also partner in mother watch duty. If it wasn't for her, the crew morale would be down the drain right about now, as I'm not sure they would have appreciated my limited cooking skills. But Mags did a brilliant job on all three meals over the last 24 hours, and thus the crew are well fed and morale couldn't be better. My new nick name is Mr Chop Chop, which should give you a good idea about my contributions to the meals.

Showers

The benefit of mother watch is that I've been able to have my first shower since leaving San Francisco; which was highly needed as it's getting HOT and it's only going to get hotter as we make our way down to Panama. Round the world crew member Jean opened her hair saloon, allowing both round the world crew member Krzysztof and myself to trim our hair in prep for the higher temperatures. Looking at Krzysztof's new hair style, I suspect it's a good thing there is not a single mirror on board; no offence Jean.

Scoring Gate

Speaking of the temperature, that is not the only thing heating up as we get ever closer to the scoring gate. As you can tell from the leader board, the top 6 boats are within just 10 miles of each other! We've laid a course that should have us on a good wind angle towards the gate, and we are anxiously awaiting the latest sched to see how we are doing relative to the other boats, which we get every 6 hours. About 20 minutes left until the next one... The number of times I wished we got the scheds as often as you guys at home do on the Race Viewer!

Scoring Gate, here we come!

Update received via email last night:

Part of the tactics was getting to the scoring gate; which was really close, but in the end our tactics to go deep for longer back fired when we found ourselves running out of wind. 

We had been gaining on the rest of the fleet steadily and were set to over take them and win the race to the gate, but in the last 6 hours we lost like 12 miles on the rest, which was crap, but then you gamble and lose sometimes...

Not the leader board Jelte is commenting on (April 25 -13:30)