Sailing: Damian Foxalland Jean-Pierre Dick on Paprec-Virbac are still looking over their shoulders in sailing's Barcelona World Race
Almost there! Just 1,000 miles to run before we reach Cape Horn and the South Atlantic once again. We are still, of course, a long way from home and the finishing-line off Barcelona, but the exit from the Southern Ocean will be a welcome relief to JP and myself after an intense passage across this wild expanse.
But if the stress of dodging icebergs and vicious weather is at last behind us, we'll have plenty of new concerns before the final quarter of this contest is decided. At least it won't be like last week, when we resembled a tourist boat, tripping around huge bergs and tiny lumps of ice but getting very little sleep as we tried to keep the pace up.
Astern of us, Alex Thompson and Andrew Cape on Hugo Boss continue to shadow us like a tracking tiger, waiting for us to slip up so they can pounce on the overall lead.
And the nearer we get to the finish, the fewer opportunities we would have to recover from such a scenario.
As we write, they're hanging on to us about 750 miles behind and it is now clear that last week's notion of getting a 1,000-mile safety blanket between us by Cape Horn was a pipe-dream; the piece of elastic connecting us remains tight.
We lost around 130 miles over the weekend; we were stuck in a transition zone between low-pressure systems, and our speed dropped to less than 10 knots as we ploughed upwind.
Our best wind angle is around 140 degrees though we expect to be sailing more of a close reach, which is almost as fast.
Nevertheless, we do have a full weather system between us and while we expect to ride this depression the whole way to the Horn, the lads on Hugo Boss have caught only the tail-end of their system, so our hope is that this will prevent them making more significant gains.
But we too have concerns about getting past the Cape despite the fact that it's summertime and we hope to have the weather with us.
And beyond there, the passage northwards past the Falkland Islands could see our lead eroded if we hit light airs, as happened Francis Joyon last week on his solo non-stop record attempt with his catamaran IDEC 2.
In truth, even if we can hold this lead, we won't really be happy until we reach the Equator later this month, because after that, the only people who can beat us will be ourselves by making a tactical slip-up or incurring a technical problem.
As far as the latter goes, we are reasonably happy; the calm weather through the ice-fields last week allowed us plenty of time to give the boat a thorough check-up. And I even managed to complete a full rig-climb, the first since we started the race nearly two months ago.
That inspection was very reassuring to us. I was able to rerun a spinnaker halyard and also reinforce one of the mast runners, which was looking a little worn.
I also reinforced the port rudder just in case it suffers a collision like its starboard twin had two weeks ago. So all in all we're pretty happy with our running repairs.
Overall, with less than a month to go, we have a full-on race going between Paprec-Virbac and Hugo Boss. JP and I may be holding a 750-mile ace card but there's little else assuring us of overall victory.
But we are in our routine of sailing fast and hard, sail changes, keeping watch, grabbing rest, sail changes, more sail changes and poring over the latest weather data - and we look forward to more of the same for the final 7,500 miles.
