Dawn

Lia Ditton unwraps the scene this morning onboard her Open 40 entry in the Route Du Rhum

A flat sea greeted me on deck two hours ago; a flat sea with a suspicious swell, deep in fetch, rolling as if in slow motion. On the horizon ahead and somewhat aft to starboard I can make out other boats, their flat-topped carbon sails, distinct. All around me otherwise is white, the water dancing in mellow undulation barely a tone darker than the low-hanging cloud that masquerades as sky.

The last twenty four hours has offered up no more than 9knots of wind and so it has been an exhausting crawl, round the buoy off Cap Frehel and past the island chains of Northern Brittany. Positions in the race slip and slide as each of us struggles for clearer air, away from the fog-bound lands of Northern France.

The breeze is clearly further out, buried in the Channel.

My engine chucks water back into the sea in an asymmetric rhythm to the drilling of the injectors. The engine lies underneath the nav. seat from which I write. While the batteries have their fill, the wonderful silence outside the cabin, is deafened. I am deafened and any sensation of the boats speed is dulled. As I sit here, I am sailing by numbers, tweaking the autopilot a fraction here and there as the wind chops and changes her mind- maybe a little more south east? No! South-south east and so on... When I leave my keyboard to trim, there is an early morning nip on deck that reminds you that the month is October.

So I have eaten breakfast, cleaned my teeth, switched from Code O to big jib, put cream on my hands, filled my water bottles for the day and checked on the weather and still there is only 3.6 knots of wind. The conditions, however slight are perpetually changing; each nuance affecting boat speed by a fraction which cannot be ignored.

There is as yet no rest.