<Written Sunday 8th PM>

So here we are, after 4 days in Brest which has consisted mainly of fixing boats and drinking beer, we are about to set off for Rio tomorrow at 1.00.

Brest is not the most beautiful of French towns and most of the resto’s are very touristy, most of the crew are, understandably on fairly tight budgets particularly the Round the Worlders, so cheap food and wine was the order of the day. Eventually I cracked and booked into a great seafood restaurant right by the docks and picked up the wine bill, the only way I could guarantee a decent bottle or two!

You could feel the tension mounting today on all boats as the list of things to be done grew and the time available shrank. Plus people were thinking about what lay ahead. We start out crossing the bay of Biscay which will be ‘beating’ direct into the wind, so pretty rough and potential for a lot of seasickness. Crossing the bay should be about 3 days then basically a straight line, past the Canary Islands, then into the doldrums at the equator where the North Atlantic depression meets the South Atlantic depression and they both cancel each other out.

They sat the race will be won or lost in the doldrums as every metre gained with almost no wind counts, so concentration when there is nothing going on and it is really hot is the clincher.

After the equator hopefully relatively benign winds coming from behind us into Rio. The whole journey should take around 23 days!

Then into Rio for 5 days before the fleet heads off to Cape Town, everybody on board wants me to stay on for the next leg, I’m thinking of doing a ‘Sea Survivor’ TV show where people can vote me on or off the boat!! I can see it going viral and syndicated all over the world!

I’ll let fate decide if I carry on of not, at this point I genuinely don’t know… Off to pack now then to bed.. more sometime later…

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