Morale is good on Cassini; the Azores are officially the closest land to us and we have nice weather and a clear sky most of the time - except during the ‘bad weather team’ (Nigel and Romain) last night during their watch, when they had to endure 2h30 of heavy rain, and ended up completely soaked.

We have enjoyed a day of ideal wind, and Liz and Coleman managed to go 26 miles during their 3 hours watch.

Temperatures have started to drop, so instead of sun bathing in the cockpit, we now spend the afternoons watching films. To extend our knowledge of the British culture, we have watched Fisherman’s Friends (a lot of sea shanties) and The Cruel Sea (what - snorkers!). We frenchies didn’t catch all the jokes, but we enjoyed it though.

We’ve been sailing on the same tack for several days now. The wind won’t allow us to reach Horta from the south as initially planned, so we are still heading north-east and will soon reach the Azores latitude. Let’s hope the wind comes around before we reach Iceland.

We are now officially on the highway of whales, all of them heading to the warm waters of the Caribbean. We’ve spotted at least one a day, and we all were really excited on Tuesday when we spotted at least 10 humpback whales, some of them quite close to the boat.

Dolphins are always around, checking on us. We can fairly say that we are friends now. A huge pod of 20ish dolphins came jumping around the boat this afternoon. As we’ve learnt, each spotted dolphin is and added extra to the trip; Nigel will charge us a lot of money in the end!

We figured out that there are more whales than fishes in that bloody ocean. We can’t catch fish even though we changed the lure for a beautiful red and gold calamari.

No fish, no ceviches. No ceviches, more weird wraps for lunch as we have reached the end of our fresh vegetables, ham and cheese stock. So we now have to be creative and Romain came up with a tinned mackerel and sweet potatoes wrap that was not so bad after all.

Our little Gryffindor lure is not to the fishes’ taste, but a brown booby bird seems to like it. It has been trying to catch the shiny calamari for half an hour. Maybe we’ll have ‘chicken’ wraps tomorrow.

Lots of baking happened in the last few days. Liz and I (Pauline) made a great use of the Ninja. Liz made a delicious ‘not’ upside down pineapple cake, and I baked several loaves of bread for our ritual morning toast. I also baked a ‘far Breton’ - traditional prunes cake from Brittany - to celebrate our 500 miles to go! Simon was clearly struggling to decide what was more important: cakes or saving our batteries. Cakes won the battle.

A biscuits restriction has been proclaimed, with Nigel as the chief executive officer. We are not allowed to refill the biscuits box until all the rich tea biscuits have been eaten. Some smarty pants took actions though and went straight to the cupboard (undercover obviously). Nigel authority is at stake here!

Last but not least, yesterday was a shower and washing day for the smelly crew. That is 6 days after our last shower. We are happy to feel fresh again, and more than ready for our last 400 miles to Horta. Overall, we are all looking forward to good food, Portuguese custard tarts and a good long sleep.

Pauline