The ‘bear from Santander’ just came out of his cave after a well deserved six-hour winter sleep.  

You can feel that he reaches warmer water, and he is not talking anymore about how cold it is. His new subject is how hungry he is, and that is with having all the food the in the world available for him. He eats already after his dinner, an extra breakfast (muesli and yoghurt) and for sure, somewhere just before midnight, he will dig into the leftovers from dinner. 

I haven’t seen a single day, that Gabry (Gabry Olivo)  did not had to throw out leftovers, maybe the cuisine is too luxury, with always having two choices for warm plates, so our two eskies (coolbox) have never seen the bottom.  I can imagine that some boats have to start scraping their food together by now, but l am happy that we are not running out.

As I said, today was big rig maintenance day.  David (David Vera) has been gluing the reinforcement plate on the rig, and has fitted the emergency pin. We let it cure overnight and tomorrow we can hang the checks back up in the rig.   I think it will be good enough, but is only a temporarily repair, so we leave the other two emergency checks up.

Made some nice gains today. Who knows what is going to happen in the next 48 hours, we might have a surprise comeback compared with the Dragons, who we suspect are pushing more current than that the maps show. I was speaking with Jono (Jonathan Swain) about this.  In one race we saw up to four knots against us in the area where they are sailing and the guys offshore sailed right around us.  But right now they are still well ahead, but it will be a good laugh if we could actually manage to pass them.

Bouwe Bekking - Skipper