Adrien Hardy (France) - co-skipper, Crédit Mutuel (Class40)

We’re on the last day of sailing before arriving; it's lovely, we’ve got ideal conditions, a flat sea, 10-15 knots of wind, and with the moon, we can see the coast in the distance leeward. With some fishing boats here and there, we hope we won’t slow down too much today. We hope to cross the line early in the night. We’re under gennaker, we were under spinnaker, the wind shifted, we were a little bit off road, our pace dropped, we did a manoeuvre and were back up to speed. 

In a few hours, we’ll have it back and we’ll put the spinnaker up again. It's nice to go to the front. It's not been very favourable for 4-5 days now. I’ve got memories of Mini Transat where the wind was up, we found ourselves under spinnaker, but here, until last night we were upwind - the trade winds are further south. We’re still making the most direct route.

For Ian, these are great moments, his project started a year ago and we are going over the strong and weak points of the race, the mistakes and the good points. From the point of view of a journey, it's awesome, and we know the crossing that we’ve made - to Fernando de Noronha and now the coast. To arrive on the coast like this by boat, it’s the best way to travel ... It's amazing; there is the competition and the journey, each race is different from that point of view. Our ETA? We expect to arrive around 2-3 UTC, which is midnight local time.