The Labrador Current

After a good start out of New York we managed to make first place for awhile. We spent the day matching speeds and were insight of other boats, even overtaking a few, however this was short lived as we then entered a large fog bank with very little wind in it. I was on the helm and there was a sudden drop in temperature and an awful smell of fish, we checked the temperature of the sea and that had dropped 4 degrees, this meant we had entered 'The Labrador Current', this runs from The Arctic, heading south with large amounts of fish in it, hence the smell. For most of the night we traveled at slow speed while the other yachts avoided the fog and made off at good pace. The following lunchtime the wind picked up, but we had dropped to 11th place. On the plus side we saw lots of wildlife, dolphins were coming up to the boat, whales kept surfacing and amazingly we saw sharks, one swam up to the boat, seeing its tail and fin we estimated its length to be about 3 metres.

Since then we have been creeping back up the leader board and we are now into 6th place. The wind is increasing, everyone is working very hard and in 24 hours we did 9 head-sail changes, each one taking about an hour to do in these difficult, cold conditions; This is The North Atlantic we were expecting and with more low pressure systems passing over us bringing wind, the faster we will make it to Londonderry.