Current position "19:12.9N 37:12.4W”. Excellent sailing through most of the night on a 3-person watch with James mostly well-behaved and sleeping through it all; he couldn’t help checking on us though! At about 4 am the wind started to die followed by a range of squalls coming in.

 

In the attached pics you can see James just after we’d patched him up, putting a brave face on his Phantom of the Opera mask. Before that you see Clearlake II sailing beautifully under spinnaker, taken from the masthead in part of the range of actions that were to lead up to the accident with the pole. After that you see a picture of the chart-plotter/ radar looking at a very large and nasty squall at about 5:45 am which we mostly managed to steer our way away from. It looked sufficiently big that Byron and Graham had reefed in the genoa and were seeking to ride out the worst from below decks. As it was we only got the edge of it – you can see the wind speed on the pic, but this was outside the squall....

 

This morning James was up and about. We checked his dressing and his wound looks to be healing well. As you can see he’s back in action with working on the spinnaker repair. Chris meanwhile has been working on the auto-pilot/ steering which has been giving us some ominous “clunking” noises – evidently our work of a few days ago didn’t do the trick. Fingers crossed we have it licked this time...

 

We’ve been asked about wildlife. Well there’s plenty of it, but no whales or dolphins so far, somewhat to our surprise as we saw lots of dolphins around Portugal. However, loads of flying fish and albatross. We’ve been sailing sufficiently fast to make fishing difficult, less to make the catch than to be able to slow down to haul it in – not so easy (or desirable) with the spinnaker.

Night sailing brings tiredness of watch-keeping and staying awake, but also fantastic night skies like you cannot see on land due to periphery light sources and, with those, shooting stars galore. We normally see about one every 30 minutes, some as bright that they are almost like a lightening flash.

 

Finally you can see us celebrating our half-way mark at lunch time. We had a welcome bottle of champagne. As we went to open it Graham went below to get the camera – to hear some exclamation along the lines of “oh xxxx” – evidently the spinnaker developed a wrap around the forestay. As it released it filled and “boom” blew straight out from the halyard (“head”), almost exactly as Chris couldn’t hold the champagne bottle cork any longer which went “pop”. A great way to celebrate half way – watching your spinnaker dropping into the sea. Graham and Byron ran forward to retrieve the sail which was starting to drag in the sea. We got it in OK -  we think it may be repairable if we take out about a metre from the top of all the panels and re-stitch the head. That’s plan A; plan B is it gets repaired in St Lucia and we’re on genoa and cruising chute from this point on.

 

Meantime we needed to continue our “celebration”, given the cork had already popped, so that’s what we did. We captured it in the attached pic. We needed to swear at the camera just before the shot went off to persuade some good smiles; Graham also had to take it a couple of times as there was something on the lens which was causing a smear on the picture, until he realised that this was the dressing on James’s face!

 

Anyway, not so great but we’ll work through it. Weather is a NE F5 so not bad for heading west on main and genoa.