NOON POSITION 13:23.43N 57:10.15W

Aurelia
Shirley and Michael Webb-Speight
Sun 31 Dec 2006 16:16
CURRENT HEADING 276 DegT, SOG 7.0 Kts, BREEZE E 10 - 15
LAST 24 HOURS 151NM, 139MTG

Looks like today will be our last day at sea - celebrated this by drinks and nibbles in the cockpit last night - only the second such event of the passage. There is some debate as to whether we will do the New Years Eve champagne thing tonight or wait until our arrival in port tomorrow morning. The Nav system is showing arrival times between 0800 and 1100 at this stage - which sounds a little early for champagne!! All dependant on the wind of course which continues to hold slightly north of East and therefore insist that we must tack down wind.
we are seeing more birds and more plastic bottles and other such crap in the water - although one of the latter items may well have been a large turtle!
we are not exactly sure what is happening wiht the battery - the system seems to be quietly working its way lower and lower - cant seem to get it to charge much above 70% no matter how long we run the genset or engine. it works its way down to about 60% ovwernight and takes about 6 hours to come back up - so we have the blasted noise with us a large part of the day.
Big clean out of the freezer yesterday and S and I discovered our precious lamb chops were very defrosted and very off! we consumed one pack early in the piece and to tell you the truth they tasted a bit dodgy then. the rest of the stuff seems fine althgouh we could no longer claim that it is frozen solid. we seem to have the quantity about right - except that we hacve not consumed any of our canned stores - so could probably have done with about 60% of what we took and then turned the freezer off. this would save a heap of energy!