Fewer than 24 hours till Leg 4 starts, a relatively short hop of 2100 nautical miles to Sydney. Our route takes us South of Tasmania (thankfully avoiding the Bass strait, notorious for its severe and unpredictable seas) and should take a couple of weeks.      Albany has been a great stopover, and although it’s a […]

Read more "Here we go again."

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 […]

Read more "A land down under"

Today is race start, and obediently we’ve all turned up at the boat for 0730 in order to get to the immigration control by 8. And guess what? It’s closed…   

Read more "And we’re off…sort of"

As you may know by now the last two boats (LMAX & Qingdao) are safely in, but failed to make it to Cape Town fast enough to knock us off our podium position. So we had the pleasure of bundling up onto the stage at the race prize-giving to collect our third place pennant and […]

Read more "Pennants & prizes"

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 […]

Read more "The Cape of Good Hope"

So, leg 1 is done, and after a race by turns exciting, boring, frustrating and gruelling we arrived in Rio de Janeiro.  On the way in I took the opportunity to pose with Jesus for the camera-man – he had plenty of time as it took me ten minutes to untangle that particular halyard – […]

Read more "Rio…"

We’re chugging down the Thames as I write this, heading to Queenborough to moor for the night ahead of tomorrow’s race start proper.  No shore leave tonight though… Thanks again to everybody who came down to see me off, and really sorry I couldn’t spend more time with all of you.  And thanks to Steph […]

Read more "And we’re off!"

So it’s finally here. 5 hours till we leave st Kats… The BBC were on site this morning and fingers crossed it’ll stay dry!

Read more "The Big Start"

The race viewer goes live tomorrow:, and will show our position 24/7 (unless we’re in stealth mode…).  http://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/raceviewer The race start will be streamed live here: http://clipperroundtheworld.com/livestream Enjoy!

Read more "Race viewer & live stream"

I’m now safely aboard Garmin, and it’ll be 11 months till I’m home again.  The oddest moment so far was only needing to buy a single train ticket to London. The boat is ready, the crew are ready (despite last night’s party), and we’re all now keen to get sailing, and find out what we […]

Read more "25 hours…"