Dee Caffari: We're at the front end fighting

The crew of Turn The Tide on Plastic are fighting for the lead in the eighth leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. Skipper Dee Caffari gives us the lowdown on how things are going as they cross the equator.

I think when you're at the front of the fleet, it's always hard when you're the hunted. It's a nice place to be though, I'm not complaining. But you do work really hard and then you get the lighter winds first and everyone then closes in again.

We've had a few clouds where we've lost too these guys next to us. But each cloud somebody else comes out ahead. That's a frustrating thing, when you work really hard for four hours and a watch gets ahead, they go to sleep and the next watch gets a cloud and they end up falling behind. The other watch come on deck and think "What have you been doing for four hours?"

So that's the hard bit for everyone. But it's a bit of a game of cat and mouse like this until we get then about break speed and sailing in a straight line. It's the nature of the beast, but at least we're at the front end fighting, not at the back fighting.

The rest of the fleet are breathing down our necks a little bit faster than us. We've got one big patch of cloud to go, and I think by the end of today hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll be in north-east trades and on our way!

A lot fewer opportunities once we get into those trades, so we really need to hang in with these guys (Vestas and Brunel), so that the opportunity at the end could be ours.