18:07.7N 28:10.3W at noon GMT. 1903nm to go.  142nm made good, 174nm yesterday.

So no blog post again yesterday.   We'd been holding off until we ticked over the 2000nm to go mark, which was shortly before sunset.  Unfortunately we tried to fly the kite for the last hour of the day, and discovered that last time it was furled it had doubled back over itself, which left us with a kite half out half in, which wouldn't be a wise plan overnight.  Unblocking it was going to take anywhere from 5 mins to 2 hours to unjam.  It takes about an hour to take it down, so given sunset looming down it came...  By the time it was down, we tucked into a late sundown beer & chicken fajitas cooked by Arran, which fitted perfectly.

Other than that it's been pretty peaceful aboard Ecover.  We've made a turn slightly south of our direct course to St Lucia to avoid a patch of light winds, which also puts us on a slightly better wind angle for boat speed, but does mean about 15% of our speed is not 'in the right direction'.  We expect to stay on this course for another day or so, then hope that the trades will fill in and we can turn west.  We haven't seen any other ships/yachts for several days now, but did get a VHF call from a non-ARC boat 'Gecko' who had been within 10 miles for half a day.  They are a couple sailing a 40ft catamaran to Martinique.  Hard work with only two people - they'd left Canary Islands a day before us.

When not on watch, Arran has been putting some time into a computer game 'Rome: Total War' which I think was a way of avoiding shouting at the autopilot.  Adam has been working on his celestial navigation, which is getting reasonably accurate but it is really time consuming to get within 10nm and takes about an hour and a half.  I might get quicker, but GPS is good!  New found respect for early navigators - I see why it was a full time role. Tony cracks on with the never ending maintenance / chafe reduction, and Dave is mostly reading / relaxing.

As of now, we are a little under 1900nm to go, and conscious that the next 2-3 days will see a fair gaggle of ARC yachts make it to St Lucia.  The kite is back up (took about an hour, including Arran going up the mast - think he likes it there) and we are making good progress again. 7.5-8.5kn in 10-12kn of wind.  Occaisonal gusts get us to more than 9, and you can feel the boat lean into it and the wake sound alive!