In the summer at home, we dream of calm sunny, cloud-free days. Even in the winter, those crisp, cold, but sunny days are a bonus. However . . .

We are still drifting across the Yellow Sea. The fog has lessened, and the days are sunnier, but the wind is absent. We averaged 1kt over the last 10 hours and we are expecting the wind to start to arrive on Friday, 3 days away. That makes it a week or more to get to Japan, and we’ve still got around 4,000 miles to go.  We’ll probably be late into Seattle as we are unlikely to make the time up. Indeed, this race could produce the record for the slowest crossing.  The weather is unpredictable, so we may end up with days of favourable winds; let’s hope so.

The race to Qingdao was quite eventful.  We gained two points in the scoring gate, but lost places when we had to thread our way through a few hundred miles of fishing fleets.  The first 50 miles were through fleets of boats towing nets in pairs or packs at slow speed, and then the next interminable set of fishing boats were laying out miles of nets.  When I say miles, each net would have floats 1/2 mile apart and may be 12 -15 miles long.  Each row was a mile apart. We negotiated these mainly under spinnaker, so our gybing became very good.  The main challenge was not seeing where these nets would be set up as our navigation system only picked up the fishing boats about 10 miles away, and sometimes it was difficult to differentiate between the floats in the nets and the boats themselves. On deck, all seemed calm with a few boats around, but down below the navigation screen was full of hundreds of targets.  In collision regulations, though most vessels under power give way to sail (yes, even 300m long tankers will change course for us), we have to avoid fishing boats. They seem to have taken pity on us in the last few days as we are hardly moving.

You may be pleased to know the code 1, our largest spinnaker, was flying again yesterday and looks good.  This was the one that we blew on the final morning racing into Sanya. After 3 days in Sanya and 4 days in Qingdao, we finally sewed the last patch and repacked it. I will try to put up some photos when we eventually get to a Seattle.  Having spent so long on it’s repair, I was at a loose end for the last afternoon in Qingdao, so jumped on to a visit to the Rice Wine factory and the Tsingtao brewery. The rice wine brewery very much reminded me of my apprenticeship with Courtaulds and the smell of the solvents used in spinning Celon . Revolting, I’m afraid. Still, the brewery came up trumps and fed us well.

The biggest challenge in china has been getting onto email and WhatsApp. Most sites are blocked and even with a VPN, access was difficult.  WeChat is usually an acceptable way of calling across the internet from China, but even that was difficult at times.

The marina we stayed at in Qingdao is brand new and built on a brand new island that is only just on charts. It is about 30 miles east of Qingdao, and the area is being developed by Wanda, the film company to attract the film industry and doesn’t open until April. It was eerie seeing so many empty blocks of flats, massive hotels and mansions. Not surprisingly, there was only one other yacht in the marina! Still, our reception and departure was fabulous. Qingdao is the longest race partner and I think Clipper have been coming here for 10 years.

We’ve had some great new joiners on this leg, some of whom have done previous legs of this race. We’ve also gone to a 3-watch system, though Dave and I still have our own routine. This time, however, we’re 6hrs on and 6hrs off, rather then 4 on and 4 off, which does make for a better sleeping pattern which is good.  With the weather as it is, every one is getting enough sleep, but I’m sure we’ll appreciate the benefits when the wind returns. . .

Love J