No contact with the yachts from this morning. Puma still leads Jaguar by some 11 miles now, but Puma are behind the leader Magnum by 50 miles meaning she has extended her lead even further (boo!!). Second place at present in class is Mostly Harmless, who are 21 miles ahead of Puma, but both the Logic yachts have better boat speed than the leading 2 at the moment, so maybe they might be able to make some headway into the gap. Puma has recently tacked out to get back out into clearer waters where there are no rocks and must be in sight of another yacht in the next class up, Jeu D’Esprit. Jaguar is still on Port tack heading inshore. Hard on the heels of our 2 yachts is Sidney, a Bavaria 42 managed and skippered by a friend of Sailing Logic’s Called Nigel Tuttle. Nigel runs a sailing school like Sailing Logic does, so it is very important that he is kept looking at our yachts transoms (back of the yacht), so that we can be the first Sailing school yachts to finish.

We have had a great report from Richard Donkin today from Puma Logic, which has been sent on to some of the sailing magazines as well as the race website (and be seen before this report on our blogger). Richard worked as a freelance journalist for the Financial Times, and writes incredibly well. He sailed with Philippe when they were fellow crew members on the same yacht ‘3 Com’ on the BT Global Challenge round the world yacht race in 1996. He says in his article that doing this race is actually much harder….now there’s food for thought!

Now, talking of food, both the yachts will be tucking into a Gourmet meal this evening, kindly provided for them by Tanfield Foods of Consett, County Durham. They have a boil-in-the-bag range of main meals called ’Look what we’ve found’ and very generously have given 3 complete meals to each yacht – tonight they are dining on Mushroom Strogonoff with mash or rice, and hopefully they have made some scones or flapjack for pudding. I hope that the guys will like it as Keith Mills, The MD of Tanfield Foods is following their progress avidly!

The weather out there is getting a little better for the yachts so it is not as uncomfortable as it has been out there, but they still have some 15 knots of Northerly breeze which means that they are still having to tack across where they would like to be heading in order to make any progress. The leading yachts are reporting even less wind so lets keep our fingers crossed that by the time the Logic yachts get up over the top of Ireland the breeze has come back.

Please don’t worry when you see the estimated time of arrival on the race website saying dates like 24 or 25 of August; it is still very early days yet and we won’t really get a much more accurate estimate until they round the Shetland Islands and are finally heading South again.

For those of you who are interested in coming down to see the yachts finish, I may be able to organise a rib to go out and follow them over the line. Please let me know if you would be interested and I can then gauge numbers. Obviously I realise that because we can’t guarantee when they might finish, it may be difficult for some of you to commit. The finish line is the same as the start line, off the Royal Yacht Squadron line at Cowes, Isle of Wight. Once finished the yachts have to go into Cowes to declare and give back their tracking device. After that they are allowed to continue back to base. I would imagine that there will be celebrations both over at Cowes and back at Shamrock Quay at whatever time of the day or night they finish. This is your official warning, it might get a bit messy!

If you have any questions for me or any messages of support for the crews, please let send them through to me and I will pass them on. There may be some opportunity over the weekend for the crew to call home when they get a little nearer to land but after that there may be a few days until they hit Scotland where they are out of mobile range so I am sure that they will appreciate messages of any kind!