Leg Three, by turns cold, wet, rough , damp, and – bizarrely, 500 miles from the finish – flat as a pancake with unbroken sunshine, is finally done.  Once again the last few days were enlivened by duelling with GB And it was great to beat them here…. 

The race itself seemed to combine the endurance aspects of leg 1 with the tough conditions of leg 2. We didn’t quite get the full Roaring Forties treatment, partly due to the ice limit imposed by Clipper which forbade us going further south than 44.5 degrees, and partly by dint of being towards the front of the fleet and escaping the huge low pressure system that battered the tail-end Charlies. However we were the most southerly boat for a week, and life at those latitudes is hard – six degrees air temperature and two degrees water temperature (no-one needed reminding to clip on – survival time would be significantly less than the time it would take to drop the spinnaker and find a casualty) take their toll, and living in the cold and damp allowed a viral chest infection to hit most of the crew.

But even with ‘just’ 30-40 knots of wind, the southern ocean seas were permanently lumpy and disturbed, making helming in a starless night quite challenging enough. The constant threat of squalls – invisible at night until their rain burden lights up the radar screen – kept us on our toes and my watch became very adept and putting in and shaking out reefs. 

We only got caught once, slammed in the early hours of the morning by a 70 knot squall-cloud laden with hail. With a steep 5 metre swell running the helmsman (Ross Ham, our grizzled Australian sea-dog) made the decision to lay Garmin beam-on to the wind rather than risk broaching at the foot of a wave, while the rest of us were pretty much pinned to the deck by the grapeshot-like hailstones. Even lifting a hand against them was painful. It cost us a broken mainsail batten and a difference of opinion with Ash (soon mended); but I wouldn’t have wanted to run before that squall either.

Once we’d made enough easting we turned north to defrost and to rejoin the Great Circle Route to Albany. The Great Circle is one of those things that should be in a bluffer’s guide to ocean sailing. It sounds mysterious, and sounds worse when defined geometrically. But if you draw on a globe the shortest line between two points (say, Cape Town to Albany) and then continue that line all the way round the globe in the same plane – looping up across Australia, crossing the equator somewhere in the Western Pacific, cutting through North America, then dipping down below the equator again towards South Africa – so that at the very centre of your circle is the centre of the earth, then you’ll have drawn a Great Circle.  

Transfer your original line dot by dot to a flat paper map and, due to the quirks of map projection, you will have a curve along which you can sail, smug in the knowledge that you are taking the shortest route to your destination.

Our great circle was flattened off by the ice limit, but once we were back on it we headed north to warmer weather, smaller waves, and huge numbers of whales. 

Now safely in Albany, fed & washed & beered, such things seem a world away and its lovely to look at the sea for a while,without being on it….