Message From nicole

The story of the race start across the Pacific...
We set off to fireworks, cheering crowds and a media scrum surrounding us. There were 10 boats out there, but 9 were ignored as the media boats all jostled to get shots of QIngdao, the home boat. The race start was in light winds. I was a little worried at one point that we would hit the line to soon, but we depowered to slow ourselves, and got a great start as first over the line (lets hope that we didn't offend the locals by being last in and first out!). So we raced hard in the light winds, until it dropped so much that our progress was entirely due to the tide. This wasn't so bad until 6 hours later when the tide turned and we started to drift back towards Qingdao. Depressingly the anchor had to come out. You may think that things couldn't get much worse than sitting out in the cold, anchored with the lights of the city still clearly in sight. But it could and it did. It rarely snows in Qingdao and it rarely snows at sea, but down the snow came. We made a little snowman and threw a few snowballs, but it wasn't the most pleasant 4 hours of my life! Things are looking up a bit now; we are moving, which is good and even in the right direction. We've scraped the two inches of snow off the deck, and in a minute I am going to get into my sleeping bag, with my hot water bottle and blanket, and try and warm up!