Yet another particularly rugged day…

The breeze disappeared for much of yesterday, and so we have fully charged batteries and a full tank of hot water having been under engine power for much of the day.  This allowed for a good dose of husbandry on main and genoa halyards, but more importantly a morale boosting hands to bathe.  The sea is an amazing deep blue colour, flat calm, and a beautiful temperature.  We had our usual dolphin and whale visits throughout the day (there’s a danger of taking them for granted), but today we had a new visitor – a migrating bird almost out of juice.  He/she rested onboard for a few hours before realising our destination was different to theirs, and so in the afternoon it departed for Africa (about 200nm away – fingers’ crossed it made it).  Later in the afternoon the breeze picked up a little, the spinnaker was hoisted again, and we sailed off into the moonlit night (yes, this photo was taken by Charlie at night!).

The sense of excitement as we close Gran Canaria is palpable.  So much so that we have a sweepstake on when we will see land, which we are all agreed will be at some stage on Tuesday.  You too can enter!!  Email/text Emma with your best guess before close of play tonight to have a chance of winning an exciting prize (which is yet to be determined!).  To help you, we had 208.1nm to run at 0900 BST this morning, and are currently averaging about 6 kts, but we hope to speed up a little as the wind picks up by a knot or 2 throughout today.

No doubt we will all be phoning at some stage very soon!

Jonathan