BT Global Challenge - Leg 2 - 23rd October

'It has been a while since I last wrote a diary entry, but this time I have a good excuse, in fact I have a sick note. It's fair to say that I have not been feeling the best. One thing is for sure, and that's the next time I am unwell on land, I'll remember how it feels to be unwell at sea and feel a lot better!

I was pretty tired after the Boston stopover - too many late nights I guess - which wasn't the best start. And from about the third day I was exhausted, aching all over. Our onboard medic - Ginger - took a look down my throat and saw the dreaded white spots, so I went straight onto the antibiotics.

The tiredness has now gone, which is great - but the infection has spread to my gums. The diagnosis is, 'Acute Ulcerative Gingivitis', I'm now on another lot of antibiotics plus a mouthwash. I can't actually chew food properly or swallow it, so I am on a noodles only diet. It's not that bad actually, there're loads of different flavours. But the moral of the story is not to get ill at sea if you can possibly help it, as you don't get off doing your watch - the skipper didn't take too kindly to my efforts to phone in sick. Not that I ever wanted to just lie in my bunk and dream of some proper rest and recuperation of course ...

As for the sailing, we are in joint first place with Save the Children. It's still early days, but good to know that we are on the pace. We have made more sail changes in the last eight days than we did crossing the North Atlantic in 18 days. Up until today it has been raining relentlessly and hard, with foul weather gear the order of the day. It's finally sunny and the buzz word is 'cloud' - watching them with a view to avoiding them if necessary. Even if it involves going off course, we are better off avoiding the rain squalls than sailing straight through them.

We have had to replace a yankee halyard due to chafe and we had problems with our vang, which we managed to fix after the crew came up with a cunning plan. They say that crisis management is a sign of a good crew and it appears to be something that we can do, now, if we could just manage a few less crises. The other big difference between this and the last leg is MUSIC! Our CD player is now working and those on tidy-up duty down below now take on the role of DJ FLATRON. It's always a treat to wake up to a new CD blasting from the saloon!!'

Since Andy wrote his report, LG FLATRON have gone to the top of the heap, and at 13.47 on Monday afternoon GMT, the BT Global Challenge website reported the positions and distances to the finish of the top six as:

1 LG FLATRON 4483 nm
2 Quadstone 4500 nm
3 Compaq 4509 nm
4 Team SpirIT 4526 nm
5 Logica 4541 nm
6 Save the Children 4541 nm