Finally the boats have come home.  Not to London; but to where the hulls were moulded in 2013.  There was something for everyone in the trip up here: the heat of the South China sea, then wind-holes and fog off the Taiwanese coast which cost us our lead, and finally a roaring, screaming storm with […]

I’m almost over my race-extension rant, but there is just one more thing to relate. One of the reasons Clipper gave for our South China Sea merry-go-round was that we could not be left to ‘float around’ near the contested islands in that bit of water. Strange then that the route they gave us, as […]

At last our absurd game of maritime musical chairs has stopped, and we have been permitted to arrive in Danang.  This race will be remembered not for weaving our way out through the Great Barrier Reef, nor for sailing past Papua New Guinea and through the Bismarck sea (surely the only bit of Germanic geography […]

Descibed by our jet-ski guide as ‘a drinking town with a sailing problem’, Airlie has been a fantastic stopover.  After several tough races, and aware of my fatigue levels gradually rising after my extra circumnavigation at Christmas and the all-too-brief pause in Hobart, it has been wonderful to have had nearly a week in which to stop. […]

Weirdly we always finish at night when we get a podium place (or vice versa, I suppose). Our drag race up the east coast of Australia concluded with a drift-off through the beautiful islands of the Coral Sea, odd wind-shadows and strong currents playing havoc with everyone’s tactics and the smooth seas a bizarre contrast […]

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 […]

Merry Christmas to anyone reading this! It’s Boxing Day here in Sydney, which means it’s the Rolex Sydney-Hobart yacht race in a few hours’ time.  Once more, the Clipper fleet is joining the other 100-odd boats for this classic race. We’re not going to win – the boats are provisioned with enough food, fuel and […]

Expecting a slightly less brutal coastal race, we were to be disappointed… The Southern Ocean still had a few tricks up its sleeve, and we were treated to eight days of upwind sailing – with all the discomfort that entails – followed by two days of storm-to-hurricane force winds. Along the beautifully rugged southern coast […]