After a challenging night of continuing
light and shifty winds, we are into what we hope will be our last full day at
sea. Just under 150 miles remain of this gruelling 3000 mile race, and we have
an ETA at the finish at the Lizard, Cornwall in the early hours of tomorrow morning.
We remain in extremely close competition
with Dragon, and were swapping the
lead throughout the night as first one of us and then the other got some more
wind and was able to make slightly less tortured progress towards the finish.
We are however, around 45 miles apart on the water, after we opted for a more
northerly route a day or so ago. As expected, this resulted in us losing miles
to Dragon yesterday, with the
expectation that we would make some future gains. At present, and this race is
far from over, we lead Dragon by
around 5 miles and we hope, have a better wind angle to get to the finish.
After more than two weeks at sea, the crew
are already starting to think about a return home, and all that will mean. No
longer the regular two hours on watch, followed by three hours off, and an end
to six pretty smelly men being stuck in close proximity in a 40’x15’ box.
Over
the past few days, a hot topic of conversation has been what we are most
looking forward to when we return home and what the first thing we would each
like to eat:
Luke - most looking forward to sleeping in
a bed rather than on the bean bag which I have slept on for the past two weeks;
any food with some texture will go down a treat after the sloppy stew-like
quality of the freeze dried or boil in the bag food we’ve had onboard
Tom Smedley - keen to no longer be woken up
by Tom Dawson at three in the morning; will be tucking in to a steak and a pint
once he gets on to dry land
Ned – will be straight to the shower when
we get back, before joining Smedley in eating giant steak
Tom Dawson – is looking forward to shaving
off what is by now quite a substantial beard; fish and chips from his favourite
Cowes chip shop is his food request
Tristan – would like some privacy while he
goes to the toilet! To eat he would like a nice meaty chilli con carne
Sam – feels that some clean pants would go
down well especially as he is also looking forward to seeing his girlfriend. He
also has a full menu request: beer battered fish and chips, plain sausage, iced
lemonade, with white chocolate panacotta ice cream to finish
If anyone has any other suggestions or,
better still, would be happy to provide some or all of the above that’d be much
appreciated by all!
--
Team Concise
