Current position "19:16.1N 34:57.5W”. We had a reasonable wind last night and good sailing this am, with the spinnaker up from 6:30 am, we’ve made good progress. We continue to have problems receiving emails so don’t really know how we’re doing but we’re happy with our progress and our trajectory directly towards St Lucia. By our estimate we’ll be half way at lunch-time tomorrow.

 

We saw some small threads coming from the spinnaker at lunchtime so took it down to inspect. In practice nothing was wrong so we re-launched it. In the process of launching James got rope burns and lost the spinnaker sock rope. In seeking to retrieve this we noticed some new damage to the spinnaker which we suspect came from the sock somehow that needs to be taped up. However, in the process of then preparing to take it down again, James got in the way of an errant swinging spinnaker pole and took a blow to the cheek. So all priority moved to getting James down below, the situation on deck cleared up and James looked after. He has a cut to his cheek but fortunately not deep – we’ve patched it up with steristrips and an extensive dressing, serious painkillers and put him on anti-biotics [thanks Hugh].  He’s had a good sleep and is now on no duty (but still issuing instructions on how to cook to Chris) and we other three will manage the next 24 hours or so. We’ve spoken by VHF with a boat near to us has SSB (long-range radio) and hope to connect later with another boat in the vicinity which has two doctors on board, and manage a relay-call so can can make absolutely sure we’ve got this handled as well as we need to.

 

In conclusion it looks like all’s fine, and we’ve done well so far avoiding breakages around the boat by being proactive watching for problems and staying appropriately conservative, but the same cannot be said for breakages with people; we’re drifting into too many incidents – we need to get on top of this..