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 Sarah goes for the medusa look :) |
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 Nicko |
 Newton |
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 Preparing to hoist a kite... with a camcorder in one hand! |
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 Sarah washes her hair... and ends up pulling big chunks out for the next few hours! |
 Julian studies a sched |
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 Sue contemplates the race so far... |
James rushes to the foredeck to fetch a mars bar that he left there earlier. |
 Apparently there were 8 boats behind us at this point... couldn't see them though! |
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 Paula admires the sunset |
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The colours in the sky were quite amazing |
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 From this peace and calm the wind got up and quickly became too strong to fly a spinnaker. We went for the polled out head sail option and Wow - did the boat fly! 50 ton boats shouldn't be able to surf like that :) |
 During this time, there we a loud bang. Turns out it was the preventer (big rope that is tied between end of boom and front of boat to stop boom going back & accidentally gybing) - thick, incredibly strong rope just pulled apart. Nicko pointed out that at 20 knots the boat is displacing 45 tons of water every 2 minutes.. that's 22,000 litres of water per minute. This boat is big, heavy and really shifting - the loads on the rigging are unimaginable... |
 This polled out headsail run was quite amazing though - 77.2 miles in 6 hours. That's a record for a Challenge72 yacht! :). |
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 Me! |
Taking another sail up for a change |
 Newton |
Tim (with beard!) |
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 We sailed through an area where about 200 dolphins were playing around the boat. Quite magnificent! |
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 The next day was even slower... |
 This is known as "not good" |
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 You shouldn't be able to take pictures like this... not in a race :( |
Some were quite good though.. even if I do say so myself :) |
 Good time to get some jobs out of the way though |
 Paula woke up! |
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 And get a bit of a tan! |
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 Then, for the first time in over a month... we sighted LAND!! :) |
 ... and not only that, but we'd caught the others up who'd all 'parked up' next to Cape of Good Hope |
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 Rob tries to get all his weight over to assist boat speed |
 Clive makes sure everyone knows which way to go! |
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 This is all you get from Paula - lazing around! :) |
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 Having no courtesy flag is not something Julian was happy with. Take a close up of one in a book, import into Word, perfect the edges.... |
 ... and print! Hey presto - one courtesy flag with creator and Cape of Good Hope in the background! :) |
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 Kate was enjoying her new role as customs person. It meant she could laugh at everyone else's passport picture! :) |
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 Despite the gorgeous sunset, we still had other things to worry about |
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 It got very exciting at this point - we're in blue coming up on the leaders. Sark in pink, BP in green and Imagine It Done in red. Unisys went too close (presumably looking for a coastal breeze) and stopped. |
 We'd overtaken Imagine It Done. Sark were gone, but if we could just keep ahead of BP... This is a picture of BP from Stelmar... |
 ... and this is a picture of Stelmar from BP - taken at the same time! |
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 Very tense for all as we went into night |
 Bit of breeze and the spinnaker came out |
 Julian radios in for the 10-mile marker |
 The dock lines come out (not seen for 6 weeks!) |
Paul gets out the fenders from the watertight bulkhead (I'd been wondering where they were!! :) ) |
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 The scheds are now happening every hour, but it's 2am in the morning and there's less than an hour to go! 7,500 miles of the toughest seas in the world... and there's less than 15 minutes between second and third!!! How was this possible?! |
 Sark are now in and we can see BP clearly on the radar. The visibility is now so bad (fog) that you can't see one end of the boat from the other. We are driving by radar!! |
 Really - this was as much as you could see on deck! |
 The finish line (somewhere....) |
 Finally, at 3:30 am we cross the line a rather happy 3rd!! |
Next page... Arriving in Cape Town.. BEER!!
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