Sailing: MacArthur needs a break as we race for the south

Early on Friday morning Kingfisher2 crossed the Equator in our race to sail faster round the world than anyone has before. At 1 am it seemed like an anticlimactic moment that we had been building up to for more than a week.

As a first timer across the Equator I was hauled on deck at daybreak by the rest of Ellen MacArthur's crew and subjected to the King Neptune ritual – general humiliation that included being doused in a combination of old food and diesel and marinated with a dead flying fish. Over the head and down the shorts was fine, being forced to taste the brew left me retching.

But while the ritual of gaining permission from Neptune to pass to another hemisphere is entertaining, there is an underlying superstition among almost all sailors that means that not courting the favour is unthinkable. And when the Southern Ocean is the next destination, tempting fate is simply not an option.

But while the Equator seemed like just a number when the navigation system ticked to zero and on to southern latitudes, over the last day there has been a new atmosphere on the boat. Until that moment the target of all of our lives has been reaching the Equator.

I realise now that I have been running on adrenalin for more than a week in an effort to suppress the emotions associated with leaving land for two months with a whole bunch of question marks on my physical and mental resolve to be answered in between. Yesterday, for the first time, I allowed myself to reflect on the fact that it seems like we left civilisation a lifetime ago and yet we are just nine days and three hours into a 60-day voyage and with all of the real hardship lying just around the corner. We have achieved the Equator, now the only way is south.

And I am not alone. Some, appear more exuberant as they contemplate what lies ahead. Others are asking themselves whether they will be up to it. In around a week's time we will begin to find out.

In the short term our issues are more prosaic. We are in the South East Trade winds and heading south off the coast of Brazil. But the bad news for us is that the South Atlantic high pressure system, which we would have hoped to skirt around the edge of, is in fact a mess of high pressure cells that block our path.

The pressure is showing on Ellen's face as she pores over the various weather models looking for a ray of hope. While we are not panicking at such an early stage in a voyage where anything can happen to anyone at any time, the numbers show that our great rival Geronimo was around 500 miles ahead of where we are now at the same stage and in the night we would have been passed by the record holder Orange on their run last year.