Amanda Shehab

The final race taking us to cross our final line, as with all clipper races it featured lots of wind holes but was a lovely sail back down the south coast into Portsmouth!

Quite a calm Atlantic return trip, which was needed after sailing right next to a fireworks display in Washington! A couple big highs sitting where they weren’t supposed to and then a run up north to try and catch a low all the way in. Some incredible boat on boat sailing into Oban where we kept Washington off but our isles and oceans just slipped though.

A lovely quick sail up from Panama to Washington, we had the Caribbean trades ripping us up most of the way for some good stress to speed ratio white sails reaching. An early start entering Washington as we had to make final call on the bridge opening for us at 0500.

A fun bucket list thing to do even if it was a long day, we transited with two other clipper boats, rafted for the canal and motoring individually for the motoring

A longgg leg, amazing wind at the start that quickly died down as we got closer to the doldrums. We ended up motoring for about 9 days with a short stop to refuel in Costa Rica (with a couple drinks of corse). This leg was more about the wildlife, lots of Boobies and the like.

Cold, wet, windy and almost entirely upwind. Add in the Chinese fishing fleet who don’t really care what your doing this was a bit of a nightmare trip. As is tradition the wind also dropped off at the end meaning we were a little late arriving into Qingdao so had quite a short stopover