We haven't had much time to enjoy our premier position in the Transat Jacques Vabre fleet, instead today we have been buried in the engine bay dealing with a serious engine oil leak. Although we are a sailing boat, we need our engine to provide the electrical power to charge batteries to run the electronics systems - including this computer - without which we would lose the vital information and services (such as the canting keel) that we need to run effectively.

It was a total shock to open the engine lid yesterday afternoon to discover a good quantity of our precious engine oil awash in the bilges,unfortunately this oil was unrecoverable as it was mixed with water from a leak in the plumbing system somewhere. Like the boat, this is a brand new engine, less than 6 months old and with very few hours and little real work - it is disappointing from all sorts of perspectives.

Just before sunset we passed just meters from the back of the lead boat Bel, the two crews waving acknowledgement to each other as we moved gently into another moonless "black as coal" night under spinnaker. The evening wind shift to the left arrived and we gybed away from our paralleling track, an hour later the left shift diminished and we gybed back. In a sailing equivalent of the a "one-two" Bel was now three or four miles astern. Two hours later we picked our shift carefully and did it again! However in amongst all this we were dealing this potentially "show stopping" oil leak and trying to get some charge into the batteries before it was too late. So we were delighted to find Ecover 3 leading the poll on the morning positions in spite of the difficulties.

Today we have cleaned out the engine bay and set up a system to collect the leaking oil and pour it back through the engine, I say "through the engine" because it is leaking very fast. We have no more engine oil on board and the oil level is already below the dip stick, if require we may be able to pull a little oil out of our drive leg or give what oil we have some extra volume with some olive oil!. On the positive side the engine is not yet giving an oil pressure alarm so provided we keep doing this and we cutback on our electrical usage I hope that we can maintain equilibrium to the finish. This is a simple problem and it has two outcomes, either we get to Salvador by the "skin of our teeth" in good shape or the engine gives up completely with a bang and we don't,

I can't believe that I am spending so much of my time in the engine bay -my last race with Ecover 2 was the same! Bloody hell!

Anyway we re leading and as F1 champ Mika Hakkinen might say "that is good" (though with a much better accent)