13:36.4N 42:21.2W at noon GMT.  1084nm to go.  164nm made good last 24hrs, 179nm the day before

News from the last 48 hours

Yesterday (Tuesday) it was a bit like Clapham Junction.  We were peacefully trying to get some sail repairs done (batten torn through sail in the main, genoa leech nearing end of life) when Arran caught another fish (Dorado for supper!) and despite being nearly 1000nm from anywhere a Chinese fishing boat started doing circles on our path, but worse pretty much refused to tell us what their plans were.  We had the main half down, genoa poled out on one side and the staysail on the other, so changing course to Port would have been pretty hard.  Anyway, common sense prevailed and we ended up passing them a mile off.  Just then we get a VHF call from Alex, who had helped bring Ecover from Mallorca to Gibraltar.  The boat he is on only has an AIS receiver, but he could see us c.35m away.  It's a small world....

Having had a great 24hr run to noon Tuesday (179nm) sail repairs slowed us down a bit, and so the run to noon today was down a bit to 164nm.  This morning we gybed round onto a proper starboard tack rather than dead downwind.  We are trying to take advantage of a small wind shift and reduce load on the genoa.  We'll have to do more dead downwind before we get to St Lucia, but this is helping so far.  Saw a pair of frigate birds just after dawn.  According to Tony, that is a sign that we are nearly there, which must be some new definition of 'nearly there'!

In the photo below, we are doing about 9kn and Arran is basically windsurfing on the back of the main to sort out a problem with Reef 1.