Barra to Lerwick, a challenging third leg in Round Britain and Ireland race

When I spoke to fellow sailors that did this race before they often
refer to the third leg of the Shetland Round Britain and Ireland race as
the "killer leg", where some of the biggest gains, or indeed losses can
be made, why exactly i am not sure. We are currently first overall in
the race so clearly we have lots to lose and hard work ahead to try to
defend the position on SunGard Front Arena.

We are monitoring the developments of the weather and downloading grib
files to try to plan the fastest way from Barra to Lerwick, this time
the enemy won't have the face of big stormy clouds and rolling waves,
but the ever dreaded fluky light airs and calms. We expect very light
airs for tuesday and as often is the case, the fleet positions could
look completely different after this leg... as one boat finds a path
through the light winds another can be stuck for hours barely moving.

Inevitably we are a bit apprehensive, the lead we have on Phesheya is of
7-8 minutes so that barely counts as a safety margin, we then have
between 2 and half and 3 hours on the other Class 40s but in such a
tricky leg this margin can vanish in the space of a few hours... take
the start of the second leg, we dropped from second to fourth in the
first few miles and only recovered as the strong winds kicked in,
whether this time we will manage to go any faster in the light airs
remains to be seen, and if we dont we could really be in for a nasty
surprise by the time we get to Lerwick.

My hunch is that this leg will favour the likes of Alex Bennett on
Fujifilm and would not be surprised to see a real come back for him to
the top of the ranks, he gained two positions up to fourth in the last
leg and was clearly fast in the light airs.

We dried the bilges, charged the batteries, got some food, cleared out
the mess, packed the spinnakers, now we should try to rest a while and
go out and do our real best... we restart tomorrow morning at 04:07am

Last but not least, i wished to thank all those that sent messages of
support though my website www.marconannini.com or on the race website at
www.rbandi.com, it is great to see that the new website has immediately
attracted a lot of attention and i know many are now following the race
avidly.