Current position "17:58.1N 45:43.4W”. We passed the point of having only 1000 nm to go at 2am this morning just as we changed watches from Graham and Chris to Byron and James. We celebrated by having a glass of white wine each for lunchtime. I’ve included here a pic of a couple of days ago showing the rig we’re now using with mainsail and poled out genoa; this in the absence of our spinnaker, but also as we would have anyway as the wind’s too strong for the spinnaker at F5-6. You can see the seas in the dawn pics taken of Chris and then later in the day with Byron. They’re majestic and fun to ride the boat down, if rather irritating when it comes to trying to cook or sleep as the boat constantly slews from one side to the other. But these winds are allowing us to keep up excellent progress with boat speed averaging about 6.5 knots at the low end to just over 8 knots at the high end.

 

This morning we did some minor repair work, with James up the mast (again) to repair what we call the “lazyjacks” – these are lines that hold up parts of the mainsail that are reefed and not being used that would otherwise flop on to the deck. The lazyjack line on the port side had parted with wear up the mast.

 

We’re starting to get to the end of some of our fresh food – the excellent tomatoes from Las Palmas met their end at lunch today, as have things like courgette/ zuchhini, cucumber and the like. We still have potatoes, onions, cabbage, apples and oranges. And we also have our extensive supply of eggs – see our egg box pic (and we added one of our wine cellar too!). So no end to good eating at this point and as far as we can see – tonight is pork steaks, and we haven’t yet started to get into the meals we prepared before we set off and froze. These are still waiting happily in the freezer.

 

Today is another longer day as we put our watches/ clocks back another hour – we are now 3 hours behind UK GMT. We’ll move one further hour back as we are about two days out of St Lucia.

 

So some 6 days to go – getting exciting!