January 4th

Another good 24 hours under sail. The sea remains moderate with Hamble Warrior riding most of the swell quite comfortably and then brief periods of rocking and rolling which can be a little noisy and uncomfortable but overall we are all coping well and have found our sea-legs and sea-paws respectively!

Last night was again a chilly one but we ate our delicious Penang curry in the cockpit and continued to listen to our audio book.

Another starry beautiful night and another light show in our wake. We both hung over the transom looking into the water and cooed at the dinner-plate size clusters of bright phospherence bouncing from Warrior's stern and pinging off in all directions.

I turned in just before midnight and as a birthday treat Jamie didn't wake me for my watch until 5am! I slept better and so did he last night - I think perhaps we are adapting to the motion of the boat and the conditions and sleeping more soundly which is good.

Today has been fabulous. Jamie made me a special birthday breakfast of smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and toast; and we also had one of the grapefruits we have been carrying which was all delicious. After breakfast I opened the cards which I have had tucked away since we saw Jamie's parents several weeks ago. I also had a lovely selection of very thoughtful presents to open from Jamie which included a Peter James paperback - crime fiction based in Brighton and one of my guilty pleasures. I have spent most of the day lying on the spinnaker bag reading it!!!

I also had some lovely text messages on our sat phone and a few emails which brought us news from home and a whole load of birthday messages which it seems my sister has kindly coordinated through my Facebook account. It was such a treat to sit in the cockpit with a cup of tea while Jamie read me each of the messages in turn from the laptop. I felt quite emotional listening to all the wonderful messages with love and birthday greetings from friends and family. Thank you so much everyone and thank you Claire for passing them on. It meant so much and we are thinking of you all every day.

My sister also wished me a day of smooth seas and lots of Dolphins! Which sounds wonderful - what we got was probably what would be described in ocean terms as "moderate" seas... and a shark!!! So close Sis but no cigar!!! It was Jamie that spotted the shark; heading in the opposite direction to us, a dark body and dorsal fin poking through the waves, the size of a small dolphin. Gone before we could examine it too closely. I have seen one sea bird today and that's it.. no boats, no other sea-life, no land, nothing around us but water as far as the eye can see... it's pretty wonderful really!

There was talk of a birthday cake but it's been a bit bumpy for baking so we have been having "birthday chocolate digestives" instead and we will make the cake on a calmer day. We have plenty of time for things like that in the next couple of weeks; or maybe we will bake it when we arrive, who knows?

What else... winds have been mostly F5, which is ideal; 19-21kts usually. We have been sailing wing-on-wing since last night with our headsail poled out. The mainsail gets reefed down and put back up again regularly. It is handy being able to reef the mainsail downwind as we can put a cautious reef in easily before bed and take it back out without a lot of fuss. Our day's run at 2pm was 153.5nm which is down ever so slightly on yesterday's but we can put that down to the captain waiting on me hand and foot!! Ha ha!

As we (think, we) are gaining an hour for every 15 minutes of longitude then at some point we will need to adjust our clocks on-board by an hour. We've decided to do that today so sunset will fall an hour earlier today and I will have one hour more birthday this year!

Finally, at approximately 2pm we reached a latitude of 23 degrees North and (despite our false claims several weeks ago when we got ourselves thoroughly confused) we can officially say NOW we have entered the tropics!! Hopefully this means it will warm up a bit soon!!!

So in summary; all is good; we are a happy little gang and I am a very happy birthday girl :)