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Close Racing

December 16 2008

Tuesday morning, 65 hours into leg 3 and still we can see some of our competitors. In fact for most of this leg we have been locked in battle with Ericsson 3. As Wouter likes to put it, this is a ‘street fight’. Typical of the Indian Ocean we have unreliable forecasts and we have to sail by the seat of our pants. Every time we separate from Ericsson 3 there is nervousness onboard, as confident as we may be in our reading of the situation, you just never know what is going to be thrown at you next! We seem to have changed between the genoa and code zero tens of times already, as the wind strength rather annoyingly, hovers permanently around that crossover. Thankfully right now we are several miles clear ahead of Ericsson 3 with the potential for a great position report relative to Green Dragon too. Delta Lloyd right now are suffering some of the same luck we had on leg 2 and are well behind, so in general we are happy with things so far.

Our new bowman for this leg Scott Gray is fitting in well as expected, although having lost one of our precious food bowls, he then proceeded to throw away a whole roll of loo paper. He may find himself short of a t-shirt or two should things get tight in that department later on. With a huge renewed focus amongst the crew, all idle chit chat is strictly restricted to off watch and this now focuses on the great debate, will we make it in for Christmas?!

Personally I’m not feeling too confident but then again I don’t have flights booked home or family coming out so it’s not quite such a concern for me! Unfortunately my dog Shackleton couldn’t get a visa for Singapore in time!

Anyway, as usual I have a few small running repairs onboard to make so I’d better go. Thanks for all the messages of support via our team website (http://www.teamrussia.org), please keep them coming. Fingers and toes crossed as we try to reel the leaders back in, now 25 miles ahead.

Cheers, Nick