On Saturday night after a particularly bad set of broaches on the ‘French’ watch there was a large bang followed by us all jumping out of our bunks like fireman to douse the spinnaker. We are getting pretty practiced at the douses and resets at this point! Anyways high powered flashlight in hand we scoured the boat for the offending noise to find that it was the preventer that had released when the boom had been dragging in the water.

We have now got into the habit of having time outs around 2am for a few hours after pushing the limits through a squall and the rigging/sail repair shop has to go into business. Last night was no exception with a repair to frankinkites tack and we had to build some spinnaker sheets from a spare halyard and a change sheet. Also we changed out the spinnaker halyard with the one I had rebuilt the day before. At first light this morning we were off again with the kite up.

The first 5 boats in our fleet have finished and there are two behind us. We are around 200 miles to go and heading pretty much at the mark.

Todays sunrise was the most beautiful of the trip so far with the clouds tinged with pink and purple followed by a double rainbow. The guys have gotten really good at helming and are building confidence each day they have also taken up fishing.

The Dove saying of the day is ‘take every change to give’….

The flying fish are even more proliferate and they can fly a surprising distance looking as Wayne said like sparrows swooping around the waves. A gannet also joined us gracefully gliding around the boat and a squid met it’s end on the deck along with numerous flying fish.

While doing some training on night driving last night I was asked what I use to helm at night and after quite a lot of thought we figured out it is actually 13 different inputs to use to sail as low and fast as possible. David says his CPU unit needs upgrading as he just can’t handle that many different inputs! So we have wind on the face, wave pattern, heel of the boat, feel of the helm, windex light, binnacle compass (for rate of turn), electronic compass, TWA, TWS, boat speed, TWD, curl of the spinnaker and sound of the  boat.

This English skin can’t deal with the heat of the sun despite factor 70 and I have put David on task of forcing me to drink more water so time for me to hide away for a few hours until the cool of the evening is upon us.

Next blog entry I will probably be on land getting ready for delivering the boat back to SF leaving around the 25th.