Skipper's log: Alexia Barrier (France) & Joan Mulloy (Ireland), 4myplanet (IMOCA)

good morningfrom 4myplanet. its a lovely night tonight with clear skies 
and stars and a warm wind, the grey drizzle and cold mist o the first 
few days of the race seems like a long time ago now!

we have settled into our rythym on board nicely, usually one of us is 
asleepand the other on deck sailing the boat.though we usually spend a 
bit of tilme chatting during watch changeovers and are both generallyup 
in the mornings and evenings. WE DONT HAVE A SCHEDULE, we just try to be 
honest with each other about how we are feeling and,if we feel good tell 
them to not set an alarm, that we aill wake them when we need to swop, 
so far this has worked pretty well and i think we are reasonably well 
rested!

we lost our wind instruments a few ays ago so have been sailing using 
just the littlearrow at the topof the mast and our feelings as a guide. 
while this is no doubt excellent practise, it is also a bit tiring as it 
reauires constant attention. we took a bit of a chance earlier tonight 
with an early gybe south, so we are looking forward to seeing how it 
works out, early indicators are good but this, clearly,is a long game. 
WE ARE TYRING TO ,soak, the boat downwind as much as possib le, that 
is,make progress south west, with out going so low we loose speed.

we have almost used all the fresh food we brought with us - the rest is 
just slowly expiring in our "fridge", which is actually just a box in 
thecorner where fruit goes to die. for me, a northern european i cant 
get used to the juxtapositin ofsailing in shorts and tshirt and my watch 
tellingme its november! alexia as a born and bred south of france girl, 
is not finding the adjustment veyr hard at all!

at themoment we are barrelin along with our biggest gennaker and a 
staysail. earlier today we changedfrom our smaller gennaker (named Boris 
after the man who very kindly lent it to us for this race); we spent a 
bit oftime debating whether to hoist our spinnaker but decided not 
too...and right now wr can rest assured wemade the right choice! our 
spinnnaker is only for very light winds and even though i cant see 
anything i would say we are currently in about 18-20 knots, with some 
pretty big gusts around

the scale of this race takes  some getting used to, when the posreport 
comes in the boats on out screen are spread over a 1500nm sectino of 
ocean; its easy to forget this, i often do, at a glance thinking, oh 
great, we,re just about to sail past Pip, only to discoer on further 
inspection that the gap im looking at is actually 120nm!

were getting some very good surfs in at the mometn, which is great fun 
but some of which Alexia might think are a bit too much for the 
Pingouin, so i,d better go up on deck and make it sound like everything 
is under control,or Alexia will wake up and want to put a reef in....

APOLOGIES FOR TERRIBLE TYPOS AND PUNCUTAION, french keyboard, waves, fat 
fingers, etc.

bisous!

joan and alexia