We won!
This morning we arrived in Lorient in France, which is our current stopover destination. The best thing about Lorient so far? We got there first!
This is the first leg in the Volvo Ocean Race that Team SCA has won, and we did so comfortably. It was a sweet victory that was a culmination of more than two years of hard work. It was a challenging leg filled with brutal upwind conditions and a LOT of seasickness, but the fact that we have come first makes all of those hardships seem all the more bearable.
We led the fleet for more than half of the leg, and once we were in pole position, we didn't want to let it go. With this win I think we've been able to silence a lot of critics who thought that a relatively inexperienced female team couldn't be competitive in this fleet - but we've proved them all wrong, and it's such a buzz!
I'm not entirely sure that it has sunk in yet, but I do know that we are at the top of our game, and we don't want that to stop...
The 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race route has already taken us one lap around the world, visiting nine cities in nine different countries. In total, we have sailed more 36,500 miles (the total route is 38,739 miles), with just a couple of thousand miles and two more cities to go: The Hague in Holland and my hometown Gothenburg, on the Swedish west coast.
While we are riding high on the euphoria of a leg win, we have just a couple of days until we take to the water again and another couple until we embark on leg nine. The closer we get to the actual day, the crazier it will get. We have already met hundreds of supporters who were there to meet us on the dock, but thousands more will start pouring into the race village to visit the SCA pavilion, which is a great place for learning more about our global sponsor SCA and some of its hygiene brands in the UK like TENA, Bodyform and Tork.
The race stopovers are always intense with lots of things happening in a very short period of time, and in Lorient I think we've experienced the biggest buzz so far!
The contrast between the buzz you get interacting with supporters, to the first peaceful night at sea is remarkable. We've just completed the shortest leg in the entire race, at just 647 miles, so it felt just like a sprint. It was the first European leg since we left Alicante in October last year and what a welcome back it was!
Slowly we've been closing the gap between us and the rest of the fleet. We now know that our chances to climb up on the podium during these last legs are as good as any. It's time to carry on performing.
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