Never was a place better named. Leg 2 has been a gruelling run for the crew of Garmin, and we were all very glad to see Table Mountain on the horizon (though I thought it was a cloud at first…).

Straight out of Rio we were beating into a significant headwind.  This – combined with the short, choppy seas generated by the sudden shallowing of the continental shelf off Brazil – made for very tough conditions, and within a few hours half a dozen crew were down with seasickness. Watch the YouTube video and you’ll see why.

Losing a third of the team made it very tough for the rest of us, and as you’ll know from Ash’s blogs we had to work very hard to keep the boat sailing (and racing). Then the norovirus hit… I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that a cruise-ship bug is one thing on a cruise-ship, quite another when 19 people are sharing a 70-foot tube.  All in all, there were just two days when we had a full complement of crew and I’m hugely proud of our team that, despite this, we led the fleet across the South Atlantic for two weeks.

To be pipped to third place with just a few hundred miles to go was mildly peeving; but there was nothing we could do other than sit in our wind-hole and watch our lead evaporate. Such are the vagaries of ocean racing. Apparently. 

Our final approach into Cape Town itself was something else.  Table Mountain generates astonishing gusts at night time. These katabatic winds come out of nowhere and hit at 60 knots (60-70 mph): although we knew we’d come in third we still needed to get the fastest time possible to ensure that LMAX couldn’t knock us off the podium (still tbc at the time of writing).  So one moment we were ghosting along with full sails, trying to catch the faint breeze, and the next we were knocked almost flat, the boat screaming along while we desperately tried to ease the sails out with spray flying, crew tumbling over each other, and the crack of flogging canvas overhead. Never sail into Cape Town at night, is my advice.

Being a couple of days early, and finding that the hotel I’d booked had no earlier vacancies, I was forced to check in to the lovely Table bay hotel just next to the marina where – as I write (and to the unexpected auditory background of the hotel pianist riffing on the M*A*S*H theme tune ‘Suicide is Painless’) – I’m working hard to regain the 7kg I’ve lost on the race so far…