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Joined this Saturday morning, Yannick Bestaven (Master CoQ IV) is still recovering from the aftermath of the Indian whilst negotiating the complexities of the Pacific.
"It's alright! The weather is beautiful, sunny, the sky is azure blue. Temperatures have risen, it's quite strange and we have 15 degrees. I have lunch in the cockpit, under a big gennaker, and it's great! I was able to clean the boat and, as for sleeping, it's wonderful: we sleep much better in these conditions. It's important to recover after the Indian Ocean which was tough.
Our boats are violent, ultra-violent, even so for those with daggerboards. You're always tense, and it feels good to relax a bit. I had a lot of back pain because I really got a plateful daily in the Indian. It was very hard on my vertebrae and I got sciatica for a while. It's getting better, I've recovered since we can sleep more relaxed.
I also take the opportunity to feed the chickens (he laughs – the boat and sponsor name translates to Master Chicken) and to do some DIY. There is nothing serious: the most urgent thing was a carbon tube from a bunk, which was broken, which was stopping me from sleeping upwind.
I'm in the doldrums, Charlie (Dalin) is back, but it doesn't stress me out any more than that. We're going into the light patch and it's not easy to know what to do. It's going to be an elastic cord, but in which direction? I don't know if I'm going to be caught out of the front or if I'm going to be able to get away. But there are going to be a lot of manoeuvres, gybes in these winds that vary between 100° and 300°, with the right amount weight re-stacking. We'll have to do a little bit of strategy...
I'm in a wind corridor and I'm trying to stay there. But I have to be careful, between the Ice Exclusion Zone and the area of light wind. As soon as I get closer to the AEZ, the alarms go off and it's not easy to sleep. And as there is no wind up there, I can't sleep too much when I'm close to that area. I think it's an advantage to be in the South"