This year’s race has, by anyone’s definition, been a stinker. Pre-race weather forecasts of southerly gales prompted doom-laden headlines in the national press of a repeat of 1998, when the race suffered its equivalent of the 1976 Fastnet disaster.

In the event it wasn’t quite that bad; but the change on the first night from a northerly breeze to a southerly gale happened in less than a minute, so sudden that we spent three hours pulling down our tangled spinnaker in near-storm force winds, and so severe that a third of the fleet retired from the race. But, being made of sterner stuff than carbon dust and dollar bills, Garmin and the rest of the Clipper fleet kept on trucking.  

We’re now in an agonising race down the eastern side of Taz with only 15 miles between first and tenth Clipper boat, and the concentration is etched deep on skipper Ash’s face…let’s go Garmin!