It’s 1000 local time here in St Lucia with our start in just 2 hours at 1200 (1600 GMT). Our final preparations are complete (141 ticked items on one list and 63 ticked items on another (phew!).

Everything important works, a couple of minor items we’ll sort in Panama. We’ve been working hard all week, finishing the complete replacement of our solar panels (long story!); testing and checking everything (rig, sails, watermaker, power generation etc.); we’ve updated our spares inventory and provisioned both dry and fresh stores.

We’ve also had fun getting to know some of the other crews with a series of evening get-togethers this week. There is the usual mixture of family crews, couples sailing double-handed and fully crewed boats with friends like us. The big boat in the fleet is Celeste, which is the Farr 65 (originally Hugo Boss) on which I raced in the RORC Caribbean 600 earlier in the year.

We are leaving the dock in just under an hour. The start is just 1/2 mile from the Marina entrance, we then sail between the Barrel of Beef Rock and the coast on the south side of Rodney Bay, then down another couple of miles down the coast to Castries (this is to give plenty of photo opportunities for spectators. After this we turn west and head to a waypoint about 80 miles north of Columbia (designed to keep us away from the big seas off the headland and some of the other more topical challenges you’ll be aware of!). The finish line is off the San Blas Islands, Panama. Total course length is showing as 1082nm and our current routing showing arrival at some point on Friday.

You can follow us on this blog and the Rally Viewer (they actually use the other “R” word on the link, but you know our motto is “It’s a Ra.. Ra.. Rally” ) can be found here https://worldcruising.com/events/world-arc/world-arc-2026-27