00.57N 85.50W  My watch! 2200 hours – evening of the 19^th February and our sixth night at sea - just missed a massive rain squall – the only dry patch out here in the cockpit is the little curve where Bennett sat!  This journey is an incredible experience – I always thought it was possible to go anywhere at sea with sails, an engine and enough diesel to cover around 800 miles but none of us have experienced adverse currents quite to this extent – yes Paul said - in the Walton backwaters if you got your tides wrong – but this is unforgiving and unrelenting – six days and nights non stop and with no respite in view.  A few yachts who left Las Perlas earlier than us have arrived in Galapagos but all keep warning, over the net, of the strong adverse current right up to the finish and hence the importance to conserve diesel.  Impossible to sail a true course with the current pulling us off to the tune of 30 degrees and if you were to stop running the engine you would drift off back to where you came from (or worse) at about 4 knots!  Roaring along with the engine on, going in the right direction, we are lucky to make 1 knot.  We are trying to sail during the day but have the engine on tonight and are motoring as close to our course as we can, trying to achieve at least 2 knots.  We have emptied all our jerry cans into the empty port diesel tank and are using this but will try and conserve what is left in the starboard tank for emergencies.

I made a delicious (even if I say so myself) minestrone soup today – chopping up the remainder of our carrots and potatoes, frying the bacon and making crispy cheesey buns to dip in.  We were replete and had all settled down to the pattern of the day, Paul reading, Bennett trying to catch up on sleep and me making my intricate flag when we saw the genoa sliding down quite gracefully into the sea!  The ring at the top of the sail had torn clean away – still attached to the halyard thankfully - but stuck at the top of the mast! We dragged the sail out of the sea and bundled it into a sail bag and down through the front hatch into Bennett’s cabin – it was then we realised we hadn’t closed the saloon hatch earlier and all the ‘day bed’ bedding, upholstery, cushions etc were soaked – but no time to sort that out as one of us had to go up the mast to retrieve the halyard so we could attach the other genoa to it and get it operational. (This is a much larger sail – the one we use as the other half of the Twistle and had just got mended in Colon – badly as it turned out.)

I have been up the mast quite a few times and was perfectly happy to go up again – so I donned a pair of jeans, deck shoes and gloves and stepped into the bosun’s chair and was hauled up. We used the anchor winch to get me up there.  I was fine past the first spreaders, gripping the mast with my knees and hanging onto ropes with one hand and the stays with the other but we were swaying about so much in 20 knots of wind that once I got three quarters of the way up it became really hard to grip and if I had swung out and slammed back again with the sway of the mast I think it would have knocked me out so down I came again – mission impossible.  And then the boys set up an ingenious loop and drew it up on another halyard and kind of lassoed the other ring and managed to bring it down.  So up went our second genoa at sunset!  Then the ‘wet’ clear up began inside………and guess what?  In the kafuffle of it all I had left Bennett’s hatch open so all his bedding was soaked too – ugh!

We call the ‘day bed’ in the saloon ‘the pencil’ as it is so narrow (but very comfortable when you are wedged in with the lee cloth and the only place you often manage to sleep when it is rough) but tonight it is even slimmer as we have had to use the skinny cushions from the cockpit!  It’s raining again so I am huddled up inside the cockpit with my huge jacket surrounding me and the computer – closing down every ten minutes to get my night vision back to do a horizon scan with the binoculars.  Nothing has been seen for six nights running.

Morning of the 20^th – still 285 miles to Santa Cruz in Galapagos – we’re covering around 60 miles a day at present -  and still only south westerlies forecast.  We had the mother of all rain squalls last night – the worst Paul and Bennett have experienced; once again I slept through the lot!  The maelstrom of wind, tide and sea state was so bad they thought they had lost steering all together.  They both stayed up all night hand steering and trying to keep us on course.  We currently have the engine off, the sails out and the sun it trying to shine – no sail makers in Galapagos so we are endeavouring to mend the torn genoa or we won’t have a down wind rig for the rest of the Pacific – hard to believe at the moment that we will ever have wind up the chuff again!