Latitude 11 27.472N ; longitude 36 38.373W Sunday 11 December 2022, entering day 10 at sea

We had our best run yet yesterday during day light we were driving forward at 6 knots :) 124nm through the water covered :) a small celebration was in order! However, we have a limited choice for a sundowner, so yesterday we opened a special bottle of cinnamon gin, given to us by John and Gill Kidd (thank you x) that we had been saving and diluted with orange fanta over ice, it was delicious…… and certainly was the right drink for the occasion:) It also tasted really Christmassy, probably the closest to Christmas we have come yet? At 27 degrees, sailing in shorts and tee shirts, 100’s of miles from anywhere, no decorations around….. it’s no surprise? It did make us think of family and friends though. We’d had short satellite phone calls with both mum’s earlier in the day and an email from Kate (our daughter), it’s so nice to be able to talk/communicate with loved ones, but, sometimes you can’t help but stop and think how far you are away from family and friends…..  so, we raised a glass to ‘absent friends’, which is pretty much everyone we know in the world! 

Unfortunately, although the forecast was for steady 15kn winds, it didn’t play out that way. Early in the night the wind started to increase and I had to wake Greg to help me get in a couple of reefs in the main. No sooner had we done that, the wind died and he had to wake me to shake them out again :| Throughout the rest of the night we were back down to light winds and slow boat speeds, very frustrating, made worse by the big rolling seas which, as we don’t have the boat speed to drive through, tip you out of you bunk (or would do without lee cloths to hold you in). Lack of miles under our keel and low on ‘Z’ credits onboard does not make for good tempers! However, winds filled in a bit as the sun came up, skipper got some Kip, we had a good brunch of Greg’s fantastic homemade bread :) and boiled eggs….. and now we are achieving our 5 knots that we know if we maintain will get us in to a Caribbean island for Christmas :) 

On a completely different note….

The funny thing about laundry is it doesn’t matter if you are home on land or 100’s of miles off shore on a boat, laundry still happens! Although the warmer weather have reduced this burden, I have a fear of arriving in the Caribbean without a clean stitch of clothing to put on! Here the water maker is a game changer! So every few days I rinse out a few bits and pieces in my manual twin tub (2 buckets) rung by hand and pegged onto the guard rails. A friend (Deb Wall) sent me a picture before loosing the internet of a tall ship with laundry hanging from every spar…… I can now confirm…… Blue Argolis looks like that picture ;), in fact it is probably adding to our boat speed? You have to keep a sense of humour and keep smiling sometimes:)

124nm run, 1,341nm to Barbados….. :)

Yours aye 

Greg and Sue xx