17:38.6N 33:38.9W

Late yesterday afternoon we heard some manic French guy on the VHF radio calling up a sailing vessel he could see and was concerned that they were on collision course with. We couldn’t see anyone else but, as there are lots of bonkers Frenchmen sailing around in everything from sail powered bath tubs to state of the art racing machines, we assumed it might be us. There was no response to our replies and then we saw a sail silhouetted against the setting sun. It turned out to be four young French guys in a racing yacht from St Malo that was returning to France from Brazil. They came over for a chat and we discovered that they were only receiving radio calls from our spare hand held VHF radio and not the main one, which is a bit disconcerting. Anyway, they were very friendly and hovered around us for a while. We warned them of the bad weather further north and they said they were aware of it but were “gladiators” - yes, bonkers.

While I finish watching War and Peace on my laptop, started on my watch last night, there is frantic activity from Annie and Steve. Steve is coiling ropes, washing down the cockpit and generally trying to make me feel guilty while Annie is tidying up inside, passage planning and writing up her diary. Skippers prerogative I say. What is a bit worrying is that Steve’s enthusiasm extends to trying out further sail combinations and in particular the cruising chute. I am hoping the wind will stay strong enough to veto this level of activity for the time being. I will try and divert his energy into putting up our new cockpit bag for sail ties and odd ropes and also finding a suitable position for permanently affixing the EPIRB (emergency beacon). We had a cockpit full of water the other day from a rogue wave and as the EPIRB was in its usual position on the cockpit floor I thought it was time to fix it somewhere higher up. It wasn’t activated but could have been embarrassing.

The water maker is still whirring away successfully which is just as well as we have already emptied one of the two water tanks, albeit the smaller of the two at 150 litres. The larger tank holds 250 litres. A combination of the water maker and all the refilled bottles we have brought with us from Mindelo should enable us to refill the smaller tank by this evening. The downside of using the water maker is that it uses around 4.5 Amps, and in combination with the auto helm this means we are slowly draining the batteries, even with the solar panel and the rejuvenated Duogen recharging them. We really must get the Hydrovane going as the main steering mechanism because a combination of auto helm, water maker, fridge and radar means that we can just about hold the batteries at 75% charge but no more.