A costly spinnaker wrap and delicate strategical decisions

At the 5am position report we saw we had done well, putting 1.5 miles
between us and phesheya, sailing faster and deeper along the route
suggested by the routeing software, which would take us north before
gybing and laying the line to the Shetlands.

The suggested route is high risk in the sense that it takes you quite
far from the shortest route and will pay off only if the weather
forecast is correct.

Further south Alex Bennett is clocking up miles and looks very good on
the position report, we run the routeing from his position and the
solution for him is to run along the shortest line for now then come up
further north later on... his route is only marginally slower than what
we had up here in the north, and he's at the very opposite side of the
playing field which makes him a very dangerous contendant to the podium,
if the northerly route is a flop and the fastest route takes a southern
bias we could be stuffed and pay dearly trusting the routeing solution
which after all relies on a weather forecast, i'm sure you had it before
that they said it was going to be sunny and then it rained, we decided
we need an umbrella.

The Round Britain and Ireland winner is the yacht that makes it first to
Plymouth so we discussed with Paul our options and decided to take
insurance on this leg.

We gybed over and are now sailing in the center of the field, Phesheya
left and Fujifilm right, one of the two might pull off having chosen the
better route but they cant be both right, so we'll hope our middle route
will provide the best hedge on the long term result, as we dont want
anyone putting hours of lead against us before the next leg...

Paradoxically this means we may lose our lead in Lerwick, but should
manage to stay right there at the top in contention for the big prize.

Now the bad part, as we gybed we had one of the nastiest spinnaker wraps
i have ever witnessed, we should have socked the sail rather then gybed
traditionally, it took us an hour to clear the mess and i came very
close to having to climb the mast to resolve the issue. After some
maths, this cost us about 3.5 miles of lost speed, so now we have to
sail even faster to claw it back.

The battle is on, we have to give the all in from here.