Gauntlet of Tamar - Gauntlet - 1000 miles to go

Here we are with only 1000 miles to go until our lives become awash with rum punch and reggae.

Tommo was in charge of the party for this significant landmark...so we all admired the safety messages he had laminated instead of prepping for the party before leaving. I'll leave you to decide which was the more important of the two. At sea. With 4 other people who were expecting a party.

The last 24 hours have also seen our reintroduction to other human kind. It started last night around 3am when Tom and Hugo spotted a mysterious light on the port bow - after much consultation we decided this one was not a star and sure enough, Cira 2 popped up on the AIS. A wee slip of a vessel at 32m wide and 200m long, this was the first signs of humanity we had seen in over a week after our last sighting of of an Arc yacht somewhere far off the coast of The Gambia. Well Cira 2 came and went under nightfall, headed to Philadelphia with her cargo of something, however this started a veritable carnival of boat life as, by the morning, 3 other Arc yachts had entered our sea room.

But back to the party. It turns out Tom is a master of improvisation and whipped out a bit of sloe gin, the chocolate advent calendar and got the tunes bouncing on deck.

Up until this point our mentality has been about enjoying ourselves while getting used to the day-to-day of boat life on the Atlantic. Now, chuck a couple of other nearby boats into the mix, and competitiveness rises up. Andy's screaming to overtake anything in and around us, Tommo has shunned sleep in favour of studying weather charts, Hugo has fitted nitrous oxide canisters to the stern for speed "just in case" (shhhhh), Stef has been busy prepping the cannons and Nick has been working on his rowing technique in case of low winds. All this means we'll probably finish 3 weeks from now. Still, we tried...

Gauntlet out.