Londonderry enjoying New York sojourn prior to voyage home

Sean McCarter, skipper of the Londonderry yacht said his team was pleased with its fifth place position but hoped to improve on the next race into its home port.

“It’s been an amazingly close race which gets even closer as it goes on, we are all so evenly matched at the moment so there is no room for error.

“We had a good race. Leaving Jamaica we came quite quickly out of the blocks and made it past the first mark quite quickly in second or third position, then we had a good run up and we decided to break a little bit from the pack.

“Our plan was to drop out of the Gulf Stream to catch them up and we were looking good to do that for a while but we dropped out at a bad time.

“There are still a lot of points on the board and we have seen how Henri Lloyd came in on this one winning the extra points.

“If you can manage that on the next race then you can expect to jump a position or two on the leaderboard, so I can imagine there will be a lot of teams looking to do that.”

Following the end of Leg 7 and Race 13: The Grange Hotels Trophy only nine points separates Switzerland from Londonderry.