Videocast 13: Thomson makes landmark turn for home

Day 54

Latitude: 48 55.50’ S

Longitude: 136 46.93’ W

Position: Second

Average speed: 11.9 knots

The Southern Ocean is not living up to its name for our leg to Cape Horn and the weather forecast does not show it getting much better. The complex weather situation ahead of us is changing hourly but generally the trend is the same. The ridge of high pressure that passed over us yesterday will now stay just ahead acting as a block and preventing us from sailing at speed.

The upside is that it does not look like we will be heading for any icebergs in the near-future and both Capey [Andrew Cape, the co-skipper] and I are very happy about that. It is still not really cold although it is steadily getting cooler and last night I dug out my woolly hat, which is now welded to my head. Breakfast this morning was scrambled eggs, bacon and beans with a little cheese thrown in. That’s the last of the eggs but we still have a load of bacon and cheese left and have only just returned to the freeze-dried meals.

Our seal for our keel box has gone again so, while charging the batteries, we are breathing carbon monoxide once more. We have contained the fumes though, and, having sailed like this for much of the race, we have learnt to live with it. A little more of a worry is that one of our keel rams twisted 90 degrees in its bearing. Luckily, we found it before it damaged the pipe work and have managed to get it back in line, but we will have to keep an eye on it.

It would be nice to say we are going to catch the leader but in the next five days the only consistency in the weather says not. At the moment we can rely on a 48-hour forecast but after that it is little more than fiction. The Horn is still eight to nine days away.