It's felt like a very long day and sleep has been short again for Ian (Walker - skipper) and me. We have been watching the progress of the Russians and Delta Lloyd and trying not to get reactive when we see the looming large in the rear window.

In fact the 3 hourly scheds have started to show them as ahead of us now and its very easy to say we should try and cover them, but we are also trying to look at the bigger picture. We have had to pay quite a high price to be the west most boat and I guess we will know in the next 24 hours if our strategy pays off. If not the boys will be dark.

We made them gybe 6 or 8 times today, sometimes in short succession and you forget how a simple tack or gybe is actually the most gruelling manoeuvre we have to do. It means that everybody has to be up, moving the stack of all the gear below and for the guys off watch it means they miss sleep too.

Youngster (Anthony Merrington) thinks I'm picking on him because he always seems to be off watch when its time to gybe. He has however taken sail stacking to a whole new level. It now towers above the helmsman in the aft corner of the cockpit supported by numerous stacking ties and posts and provides some protection from the squadrons of attacking flying fish. Well hopefully the gybe frenzy is over and we might be into some reaching over the next few days.

In other news we got lost today. Both my GPS's failed today. The expensive one this morning so we seamlessly switched to the cheapy backup, but then this afternoon that failed too. At one point I had to wait for the Sched to come in to find out where we were. I'm not worrying too much as the boat is actually full of GPS's. All the Sat C's and AIS beacons have a built in GPS and if I can't get one of mine fully working I will jury rig something from one of those. If all I fails I will break out the $9.99 Plastic Sextant.

Ian Moore - navigator.

Visit www.volvooceanrace.org for all the latest news!

The Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09 will be the 10th running of this ocean marathon. Starting from Alicante in Spain, on 4 October 2008 with in-port racing, it will, for the first time, take in Cochin, India, Singapore and Qingdao, China before finishing in St Petersburg, Russia for the first time in the history of the race.

Spanning some 37,000 nautical miles, stopping at 11 ports and taking nine months to complete, the Volvo Ocean Race is the world's premier yacht race for professional racing crews.