Downwind sailing at its best, although JAMAICA is falling behind

Duncan Bagshaw constantly trimming the sails in changing conditions

After an excellent few days' sailing and making great advances, JAMAICA has slipped further behind the pack in the last 24 hours. Their strategy of sailing close to shore had clearly paid off as it allowed them to get within 47 miles of the lead boats this time yesterday. The earlier gains were made because the sea state picked up closer to shore and then the wind built quickly. Pretty soon they needed to peel to the heavyweight kite, and then that changed rapidly to forget the heavyweight.

The wind eased off and they were back under spinnakers by early morning and had peeled back to the lightweight by lunchtime, then pretty much in a wind hole for a number of hours.

Unfortunately, this has led to their falling behind again as, like Durban who are also assuming a similar position, they have covered just 88 miles in the last 12 hours compared to the rest of the fleet's managing over 100. Even Liverpool which had taken a wide westerly position has now come back into contention and is now only 17 miles behind 9th placed JAMAICA which finds itself 90 miles off the lead. A frustrating time for the crew and trim, trim, trim is the order of the day as they try to pull back the miles.

But spirits are still high as Claire Maloney, from on board JAMAICA writes :

‘A boxer left the ring after winning the world championship. His trainer took all the money and he never got a cent. Why not?’

Now, I don’t want you to think we’re sitting around in the sunshine doing nothing all day, it’s just that there are times in between sail changes when it’s possible to chat on deck. Granted the conversation is frequently punctuated with ‘trim’, ‘grind’ or ‘hold’, and the helm is often concentrating too much for full participation, but chatting is definitely possible.

We’re getting a bit intellectual on JAMAICA at the moment. Lisa bought an IQ test book in Santa Cruz, with the idea of testing the crew’s IQ before and after each stopover. So far we’ve discovered at least one crew member is of ‘borderline’ intelligence. We moved on to lateral thinking problems this morning, like the one above. The question master is only allowed to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to any queries. We’ve a whole book of these to get through.

There’s been a reading frenzy going on too. The only sail trim book left that managed to escape the wet has been read by nearly everyone. Every time you come on deck there’ll be someone quoting from the (very small) section on spinnaker trim. The saloon has been renamed ‘the library’ and is generally full of people just reading. Obviously, being a racing machine, there are books on trim, weather and tactics, but just occasionally the odd novel or biography might just slip through the net.

Every day’s a school day on JAMAICA. And the lessons don’t stop at night, you know. After dark ‘Stellarium’ gets pulled up on the computer. Introduced by Gus, it’s proving extremely popular. Once it’s set up for where you are in the world, it will show you the night sky in real time, with names of stars and constellations and even some cheesy artist’s interpretation of the constellations. It’s definitely our favourite new toy.

But anyway, as guessed correctly by the crew, ‘The boxer’ was a dog who had just won the championship at the dog show. "

And John Braithwaite, another round the world crew member has also got the reading bug :

"All is going well. It's been a lovely sail so far this leg, all down wind, we have kept moving & no wraps (touch wood!). It's about to get very hot. I'm reading Panama Fever about the building of the canal - very interesting."

At the end of the race the crews will enter the Panama Canal to transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean before continuing their journey to Jamaica.