A disappointing end to a promising start.....

After a full on day of upwind sailing we were in a great position but 'The Shed' was proving hard to catch. By 5am the Scilly Isles were on our right and it was time to get the spinnaker up & hopefully leave the others in our class standing. At this point the main threat was going to come from behind in the form of Chris Tibbs in Taika. If we could hold him off the race could be ours as we hoped to find The Shed no trouble to catch in the new conditions. We shortly had 14 kts of boat speed surfing down 10ft waves and all was going well. From the distance we could see Chris gaining quickly on us (below is the video of when he screamed pass us!) Within 5 minutes of turning the camera off that nice, new, huge, white spinnaker he had up went 'Pop'!! Not a cheap mistake to make however it left the lead open for the taking and we left him behind.
At 15.00 on Monday and 27 hours into the race, we had two class 40's, an open 50 and a mutihull around us - either we were having the race of our lives or they were having the worst of theirs as they should have all been at least 3 hours ahead of us by now! With a great sense of achievement we plowed on, both of us on deck at this point as sleep was far from from our minds with the finish line only 6 or 7 hours away.
The forecast before the start stated the wind would drop just before we reached the finish however it was looking like we may just reach the line before it did but that would mean holding 9+ kts for the remainder of the race.
By 19.00 the wind had dropped to 10 kts, now it was almost certain that we would run out of breeze and stop just before the finish if the forecast was correct. The only question now was how close to finish line could we get before we lost the wind??
We had covered 228 miles in 33 hours then slowed to a crawl 4 miles before the finish! With 1 mile to go our boat speed read zero! At this point we had 1 hour before the tide would turn and take us backwards at 0.5 kts for 6 hours so.....I picked up an oar and started to row for the line.
We crossed the line at 01:16 ie 37 hrs after setting off from Plymouth. Unfortunately all the work to get to the front and then stay in front was undone in the last 4 hours when we were passed by 3 boats who were all slightly to the East of us where they was a little more breeze.
We start again tonight at 01:16 and are currnetly 4th in class and 11th overall going into leg 2. The boat is still up together having suffered only minor failures. All told not a bad place to be but far from the result we thought we had with just 15 miles to go!