View looking up the slot. Drone shot with morning sun. Stu: Lots of nice sailing for today. Which is a nice change from the last day or two, which had unbelievable cloud activity. Talks about having a sudden squall with everything on the wrong side (stack, water ballast, OBR). Didn't work out well; lost a lot of miles. Shots out the cabin at night with lightning on deck. Horace works in red light as thunder rolls. Rain. Kevin reads a sched on the PA. "So we've been the slowest of the fleet except (someone)." Pascal talks in French. A bird (gannet? booby?) flies over the masthead. Drone shot. Carolijn on the helm.Radar shows a cloud. Night time crew work. Simeon: "Tack coming off, Nicolai!" "Can we have the jib on here?" Simeon, below, explains that they can see the rain showers coming by on the radar. They can see, like now, when the cloud has gone over and sucked all the wind away, so they switch to a bigger sail. Someone (Justin?) talks with Brian about the massive cloud sucking up all that energy. Lightning. Nicolai: I think it's day 5... I miss the Southern Ocean. Sail flopping. "And it's warm. I hate the warm."Cool nighttime drone shot of AkzoNobel sailing in light wind under a cloudy sky with lightning flashes visible behind them. In the dark, Jules talks with Simeon about it. Jules explains that they have a supercell behind them. Are concerned about the plate on the keel giving way and letting lots of water into the boat if they go over 20 knots. "It's an interesting evening." Nicolai: "I think it's too early for the J2." He talks about getting a proper thunder cell to get them to the finish. More drone shots. Favoriting for the beautiful drone photography, mostly.On the bow, Xabi talks in Spanish. "Mucho calor." At night, we see a light shining forward from the cockpit toward the sail and hear a sheet being eased. Looks like a squall. Trimming, grinding, lightning. Stacking. Lowering the J1.Opens with a shot of the boat moving, yay! Shot of the keel. Mark talks about their "totally crazy" night last night. Splits in the fleet, reconvergence. Shots at night of Dongfeng super closer to them. Dongfeng's running lights, sail tapes, silhouetted by a lightning flash. Crew in the cockpit working in red light, illuminated by lightning. Best thing, he says, is they came out ahead, and now they're moving at 12 knots. Looking forward to the NE tradewinds. Stacey talks about how they got showers in the rain last night, and now it's super hot again. In the midst of it, Tony, on the helm, asks her to traveller down; she does it as she continues talking. Interesting that they're trimming the main via traveller from the starboard forward cockpit winch; mainsheet appears to be cleated off. Then we see Nick trimming the headsail; Tony on the helm says, "Stand by for puff. 3, 2, 1, [something]." Nick eases the sheet. "Good puff." (Or maybe "Good pop"? Not sure.) Below, at the nav station, SiFi says they're at 3 degrees south. Slowly making their way through the doldrums. Now in a much more stable breeze of 6-8 knots. Probably another 24 hours of slow going; another night of looking out for clouds. "Wanna make sure we're on our toes." They came out on the good side of it last night, but want to make sure they don't do the opposite tonight. In the cockpit at sunset SiFi gives an update. Phil comes through the hatch, shirtless to show his tattoos, including a full left-arm sleeve and some writing I can't make out on his left side. "News is not good." [Joking? Then he continues to the stern to use the head, I'm assuming.] Mark: "We've got one more night." Phil sings, "One more night!... What song is that?" Martin (I think?) answers: "Phil Collins."Crash cam/stern cam night shot. Boat gybes (or I guess the wind suddenly changes direction) such that the MH0 backs from the port side and they lie over with the keel on the wrong side. Bouwe: "Furl, furl, furl!" "I don't have any runner; I've gotta get the keel up." It's a little frustrating that Yann cuts off the crash-cam footage as soon as he does to go to Rome, the next day, describing what happened. "When you're going that fast and you have big sails up it's hard to keep up with it." More of the stern cam footage. Sally, the next day, explains that they came out of it okay, but lost a lot of distance in the process. Night shots with lightning flashes. Rome: "We were pretty close to MAPFRE and AkzoNobel, and we kinda were on the wrong side of that cloud. The other guys got the best of it, but that's part of sailboat racing, I guess." More night shots. Sally describes how they could see the other boats gaining on AIS, but there wasn't really anything they could do based on their position. Night shots of showering in the squall. Rome and Sally recap that, including the tight space in the optimum shower area under the boom.In the morning light, Ben stands on the boom to look through binoculars ahead of them. Ben: "We've seen a sailing boat with a square-topped mainsail and a masthead sail, so we think it might be one of the other Volvos." Have been following them in the sched, and now have seen them in real life. Below, Libby calls out the latest sched. Sounds pretty happy. "Spotted Brunel about 40 minutes ago off our windward bow." Crew eats breakfast on the bow, talking about it. Witty: "One or two days ago we were a hundred miles behind the leaders." Ben: "We had to fucking work pretty hard the last two days." John talks about how they've worked hard, so to get where they can actually see and identify a yacht is cool. Witty talks about not giving up, keeping trying. "It's a really important leg for us. It would be catastrophic to come in last." Night shots of lightning. Witty on a PA tells the crew about Brunel being 9 miles away on AIS. "We're winning the sched for the first time, so well done lads." Talks about a rain cloud. "We've got this rain cloud which looks [BLEEP] horrendous." Beautiful shot of the waning gibbous moon rising through clouds behind the helmsman, silhouetting him. Next day, Witty talks on deck sounding despondent about getting stuck in the rain cloud with no wind. We see Libby at the nav station with Grant looking at Expedition's "Strip Chart" display. Libby: "True wind angle's at 120 here." Grant [pointing]: "So all this is starboard gybe..." Witty talks about losing 50 miles when they got stuck in the cloud and the other boats didn't. "probably lost 10 of the 30 miles there, and then we lost 20 of the 30 miles sailing 170 degrees off course... "We just did one of the stupidest things ever and now we're 30 miles behind running last again... We're the ones letting ourselves down. It's not bad luck; we're just being idiots. And we deserve to be here at the moment. And I'm just concerned that you don't get too many chances in this quality fleet to go from 30 miles behind or 100 miles behind to back in the lead. Somehow we've got 3,000 miles to figure out how we're going to do it. Again." He and Grant sit on the bow discussing it.High drone shot showing Dongfeng in the foreground and AkzoNobel in the background. It's a pretty distant shot, and makes me wonder: The OBRs haven't been using this opportunity to get drone closeups of their competitors (which they did, a little, in Leg 2). I bet there was some kind of agreement to limit that, presumably for competitive reasons (i.e., an extension of the "OBR shall not contribute to the racing" concept, such that they shouldn't be potentially helping their crew steal info about setup on the other boats). Anyway, Sam's voice is lapped over the shot: "Nicho, tell me about the art of sailing through the doldrums." We see Nicho, who tells a story about meeting with a meterologist who talked about clouds all day, and he asked him how to tell a good cloud from a bad one. "There is an element of luck... I"m lucky I enjoy it." Luke talks about being stuck in the doldrums, playing cat-and-mouse with Dongfeng. Overlapped with a time-laps of the drone shot of the two boats - which I realize now shows a third boat, Vestas, ahead of them both. Simeon, on the helm, talks about trying to sail from puff to puff. Shot of Dongfeng ahead of them and to leeward. Luke talks about how he thinks Dongfeng is probably tense on board, with their close competitor MAPFRE close by. Shot of a rain cloud. Drone shot from astern as the sun is setting to port with a competitor on the horizon while Brad is hoisted up the mast. Drone shots circling him at the masthead showing rain clouds and the other boats around them. Nicolai talks about them sending Brad up to look for the beeze, having 5 boats in the same area. Simeon, shirtless with the low sun on him, talks about being pretty happy with the situation. "Fighting, you know, every single watch and hour." A shot of them approaching a competitor (I think; unless it's a low-altitude drone shot of their own boat) with the sunset sky behind them. We see the other boat just a few boatlenghts away. Someone says, "There's somebody standing on the prod." [?] Brad (I think) calls out to them: "Who's the monkey on the bowsprit?" We hear the response. Something like, "Go back to Kerikeri, mate", which makes Brad chuckle. [Brad and Blair Tuke are both from Kerikeri, NZ.] I think this must be the super-close approach they had with MAPFRE around 2018.01.10 08:20:10 UTC, so that would make it either Blair or Louis who's answering. Brad, invisible in the dark: "It's nice to talk to somebody from another boat for a change. As much as I love these guys, it's nice to hear a different voice for once. Especially one from Kerikeri." Awesome drone shot passing AkzoNobel at low altitude, flying toward MAPFRE. Lightning-flash illuminated shots of them sailing in the squall that night.Night, in the rain. Lightning flashes. Heh. Brian Carlin beat Martin by less than 8 minutes in getting his video up from TTToP. The crew works in flashes of lightning. Kevin, shouting: "Ease up the luff, Jack!" I kind of love this one, and love the contrast it makes with Brian Carlin's on TTToP, in terms of each OBR's different filmmaking style. Ima favorite both of them, though I'm not sure I would have favorited either by itself. My tags, my rules. :-)At night, in the red light, we see rain coming down on deck as the crew trims the sails. There's a flash of lightning and almost immedaitely a crash of thunder. Brian [Thompson], who was in the cockpit in his shorts getting a shower, heads below. "Instruments went down." The camera follows him to the nav station, where Dee is sitting. "We just lost everything... I think it's coming back on. Whoa; the computer's just went funny. Okay; it's coming back on." On deck it's pouring rain. There's another flash, and several seconds later the thunder. Brian, looking at the radar screen. "Half a mile. We're getting out of it pretty quickly."Crash cam footage from the stern cam: They're sailing in light wind and heavy rain in a squall. There's a flash of lightning and a loud crash. Rome, on the helm, jumps off the helm platform to crouch down in the stern. They laugh. Rome: "Holy shit!" Below, Kyle and Sam watch the footage on a laptop. Kyle: "He's very easily scared, that Rome-y. You'll walk around a corner and he'll jump. Very easily frightened." More of them watch and laugh. Rome: "Shat my pants it was so close." Sam, on deck, talks about having the lightning strike quite close, feeling the static through their bodies. "Bit close for comfort. Lucky we got out with the instruments unscathed." Night shot of distant lightning. Shot of the mast instruments at night. Bouwe at the nav station. Closeup of the compass dial. Slomo wake shot. Shot of passing Ghupuna; drone shots of passing Ghupuna. Sally, with a Scopolamine patch behind her right ear, looks at land. "Nice. It's a little bit of something besides blue water." Jens: "It's always nice to see land. It's only halfway, looks good. Have a couple of boats we want to catch." Yann, to Bouwe on the helm: "You like the green you're seeing, or...?" Bouwe: "No. I like more the beach, actually. I'm more a beach man." Shots of the island. Abby and Sally working in the pit. High drone shot of Makira behind them.Joan talks in Spanish about the Solomons, wind, squalls, complicated strategy, Dongfeng ahead, and the other boats behind them. Xabi talks about how they've been in this situation before, lead by Dongfeng through much of the leg. "Now we've gained as much as possible, and wait for our opportunity." Talks about the doldrums coming up. Night shot of distant lightning silhouetting the helmsman. In the day, Xabi in the pit. Shot of Dongfeng ahead of them and to port with an island below them. Stacking. Green island to leeward. Pablo grinds with an island below them. Stacking forward. Shot astern with a whale surfacing; then slomo of the whale surfacing. AkzoNobel behind them. Dongfeng ahead and to weather. Light winds. AkzoNobel close behind them. Willy looking through binoculars. Drone shot of a fishing boat with a purse seine and MAPFRE in the background. Circling drone shot of MAPFRE with Dongfeng visible in 3 miles away, ahead and to weather.Night. We see lightning flashes miles away. Martin describes what we're seeing. Someone (Elodie?) gasps. "That was a beautiful one!" Someone else (Bernardo?) responds: "A very beautiful one."