Still 1st - JAMAICA opening up a bigger lead

At 12:00 today the leader board showed a strengthening of JAMAICA's 1st position. JAMAICA is 28 miles ahead of 2nd placed Hull and Humber having covered 66 miles in the last 12 hours compared to Hull's 41.

As can be seen from the graphic above, JAMAICA has taken the most easterly position of the fleet and their tactics appear to be paying off. Even Western Australia, currently in 10th place and fully 71 miles behind JAMAICA has decided to change tactics and sail more to the east.

Only Singapore in 3rd place has managed to cover 60 miles in the last 12 hours - the rest of the fleet have sailed between 39 and 50 miles so this shows what a fabulous achievement JAMAICA has made, outsailing all their rivals.

The white line above is the most direct route between Singapore and Qingdao, and you can see that JAMAICA is sailing a North Easterly parallel course.

However, as Claire Maloney, writing from on board JAMAICA, states, this is a new experience for the crew :

This really is a new experience for us: JAMAICA Clipper first in a schedule.

No, it wasn’t a misprint, but we’re not quite sure how it happened. We’d just been sailing happily along, minding our own business when an e-mail arrived informing us that we were officially the closest boat to the waypoint. Now we’ve got a reputation to uphold here. Rushing is just not our style…

Needless to say, the crew were rather excited with this apparent change in fortune. The schedule has been printed out, and there have been calls to laminate it, for posterity. Not wishing to hog the lead, we’ve let Danny take a turn, and we’ve held second place behind Hull and Humber for a couple of schedules now.

There is about to be a fair bit of movement in the positions over the next 24 hrs or so, as the fleet pick their different routes around the Indonesian Islands. We all need to be heading in a NE direction, but that is exactly where the wind is coming from. So we are all tacking our way towards Taiwan, alternating between an easterly and northerly course. The wind never stays completely constant, so sometimes one tack is more favourable than another, and we are constantly switching.

As we start to head north we’ll probably lose some of the advantage we’ve gained so far, but hopefully not all of it. We’d lost sight of the other Clippers for about 24hrs, but are expecting to sight at least one, if not more, over the next few hrs, as our courses converge. Racing with the other boats in sight is exciting and keeps everyone on their toes.

This might be unfamiliar territory for us, but we think we’ll might just try and stay at the top end of the leader board for at least a little while longer.

One love,

Claire

As can be seen from the graphic below, the fleet is sailing with the Southern coast of Vietnam to the North, passing Brunei to the South on a course taking them into the South China Sea beyond the Philippines, Macau and Hong Kong to the North, sailing close to the South of Taiwan (the island to the top right hand side of the graphic) and into the Eastern China Sea before heading North West to Qingdao. With over 2,000 miles to go and only 71 miles separating 1st from 10th there is still a long way to go but better to be looking back to the rest of the fleet than enviously to the boats ahead.