17:40.1N 44:06.9W

Yesterday marked the half way point of our passage and Annie was keen to mark the occasion with a swim. The water temperature here is 30.6 degrees which was enough to persuade Steve to join her. For my part someone had to stay onboard and keep an eye on things. They can now proudly say that they have swum in the sea over a thousand miles from land (French Guyana is 992 miles at its nearest point but I think the story can over look the odd few miles) and with nothing beneath them but over 4000 metres of abysmal depth.

I had some disparaging comments recently about spending too much time below on my computer that I thought a tad unkind given that I am broadcasting to the wider world. Nevertheless it occurred to me that my midnight to 0300 watch would be a good time to write the post. This morning I have been distracted by an AIS contact and it is 0300 already and time to hand over. However the contact is cargo ship Panther Max that could come within a few hundred feet of us in about an hour so I will stay up and multi task the blog with avoiding the ship. In fact we have now called Panther Max and had a very friendly response to say that he can see our light and will keep clear of us. We had the masthead light changed to an LED some while ago and despite misgivings in the yachting press about the effectiveness of LED’s, this one seems really effective. The other technical point to come out of this encounter is that we were getting no response on the radio until we switched to high power output. When we had the problem communicating with the French yacht a few days ago we noticed that the radio was set to high power and we changed to low, which is recommended practice. Given that Panther Max was only 8 miles away when we called does this say anything about our radio transmissions? Anyway, its always nice to make contact with other souls out on the ocean although if we hadn’t spoken to this one we would be getting pretty nervous about how close his lights are getting.

Yesterday the beloved Hydrovane was working well but seemed to be constantly steering in on direction. Today we traced this to the unit being out of alignment with the centreline of the boat - probably as a result of the securing bolts needing to be tighter. So, two socket spanners and a trip to the transom later and all is back in line and working as it should be. We now have a 10 knot north easterly breeze and smooth sea so we are cruising along at 5 knots with a very gentle motion; if only all sailing could be like this!