...that "everything is absolutely soaked..."

That's from WINGS, who's been out front of the 1500 fleet pretty much all the way... This is probably the fastest start for the 1500 ever...

I like a big foredeck locker, but I'm always amazed that even the highest quality builders seem to have trouble keeping them watertight... Many of my trips on boats with a deep sail/anchor locker forward, have ended with a prolonged 'drying out' at the end of the trip of everything that was stowed there...

" Wings Blog for Tuesday, Nov 5

Yesterday afternoon, smack in the middle of a squall, Howard and Dave started on about how the bow of the boat was too low to the waves. An inspection of the forward locker found a secret swimming pool and Dave promptly dived in. The two them then spent the afternoon pumping out a huge amount of the Atlantic-- not an easy feat when the only tools you've got are about $10 worth of kit from K-Mart. If this problem continues, Howard will soon resemble Popeye... he could win an all-comers arm wrestling contest in any Norfolk bar."

The crew aboard WINGS has a great attitude, but it sure sounds like they've been getting tossed around quite a bit inside that spacious interior, more than one of their blogs has included a report of a body being hurled across the boat, resulting in a nasty bruise...

One boat whose performance has really impressed me, is the Hanse 430 AVANTI... they got a late start coming down from NY, and were trailing the fleet by a substantial margin at the start... They've drawn even with the back of the pack, aided no doubt by a more favorable sailing angle than the rest, but that boat is definitely moving right along... I'll bet it's been a hard, noisy ride on AVANTI, however... (grin)

All credit to this entire fleet, however, looks like they're handling some pretty challenging conditions quite well, good for them...