A frustrating start to the third leg of the Around Alone Race has left Emma Richards trailing at the back of the Open 60 fleet and battling with gear failure.

The only British sailor in the single-handed round-the-world race, Richards was in third place when she started to encounter problems with her electronic autopilot, five days into the leg from Cape Town to Tauranga in New Zealand.

"The pilot started playing up, skewing towards the wind and consequently tipping the boat on its side," the Hamble yachtswoman reported.

"The reading on the pilot had a totally different course than the one I'd set. I believed it was my error, so corrected it and turned for a moment to pick up what was thrown into the bilges - and the same happened again!

"When you are travelling at 20-pus knots and the wind is between 30 and 40, you don't want to have to change over to a back-up pilot as this means nothing is steering the boat for a short period of time. I sat at the chart table with a remote control in hand and watched the pilot course, it seemed to jump ten degrees every so often until it was about to put the boat on its side again, so each time I saw that, I countered it by going ten degrees the other way. This was happening every couple of minutes."

While she works the problem out, Richards's speed has slowed and now Pindar is lying in sixth place, some 250 miles behind the leaders, Bernard Stamm on Bobst Group-Armor Lux and Thierry Dubois' in Solidaires, who have reached the Roaring Forties via a more breezy northerly route.

The entire fleet is currently struggling in a huge depression which could affect their progress over the next couple of days and beyond that, as they head into the Southern Ocean, they will face unpredictable conditions caused by a high pressure system moving south-east from South Africa.

Lucky for some -- London Boat Show comp winner Friday 13th proved lucky for Samantha Cowley from Winchester. She was our first winner in Sailsolent's Schroders London Boat Show competition.

Samantha correctly answered the question 'Where will the London Boat Show be held in 2004?' to win two adult and four child tickets to the show which opens on January 3rd.

There are still two more sets of tickets to be won between now and Christmas so take a look at the link on the right to the 'London Boat Show' and see if you can be our next winner.