After arriving in New York skipper, Sean McCarter was quick to heap praise on his team as they now lay just 10 points behind third placed OneDLL on the overall leaderboard. Sean commented:

“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. That dropped us back a little bit. 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.

Currently in a respectable fourth place on the overall leaderboard with 106 points, Sean knows that with so many points still up for grabs a podium position is still in sight for the team. With the pressure of arriving into his home port and securing a podium, Sean remains calm and unfazed:

“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 them 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.”

The fleet is expected to arrive into Derry-Londonderry between Saturday 21 -23 June, where a week long LegendDerry Maritime Festival has been organised from 21-29 June. For more information on the programme - which includes a concert by the Grammy award-winning Beach Boys - visit www.legenderrymaritimefestival.com