It has been an amazing journey so far. Having stopped for nearly 24-hours and then still being on the scheduled arrival time is not what we had anticipated the moment we decided to drop anchor.

First we noticed that we caught up with the Dragons pretty soon after we left our shelter. That raised the spirit on board.  Beating upwind with these boats is no party. We decided to put a second reef in the main, but that didn’t work out quite well. Chuny (Roberto Bérmudez/ESP) decided to drop the mainsail and hoist only the J4. Under that single sail we still managed to run some 10-11 knots, and above that, the boat was still manageable.

At daylight, and under a little more favourable conditions, the main was hoisted again and soon we were doing 15 knots, still with wind speeds up to 35-40 knots! Every sched that came in raised a cheer from the crew. We were gaining a lot of miles on the four boats ahead of us and we intend to continue that streak.

At present we can say that we crossed the passage between Taiwan and the Philippines. A little bit manoeuvring through some shallows and along some islands and we are in open waters to go wherever we want to go.

Should we make another stop in Taiwan? After all, the total sailing time was not really influenced by our last stop. An interesting thought: ‘How many stops can you make, or how long can you stop without changing the sailing time??’  There must be a maximum there…

Anyway, as I said, we continue to catch up with the group ahead and still aim for that glorious place at the top, at least for this leg. 

Frits Koek – Nnavigator