We are now firmly in the trade wind belts and the crew are now used to the rolling motion of the boat and the whole demeanour has changed from tired and grumpy to the default of cantankerous and argumentative its nice to have everything back to normal.  We are currently at 16:34.48N 33:50.74W and loving the conditions Consistent wind from 12 to 20 knots with occasional gusts to 25 and a following sea. Its great taking the old lady surfing down the waves I can hear Beach Boys harmonies in the background! The current record for getting the best surf speed is Dan feel the need for speed Wingrave (yes I know these stupid names are starting to get tedious but it still keeps us amused) who clocked up 11.1 knots dont think Itchycoo Park knew what hit her. However she is not getting any younger and in common with most of the crew as she gets older things fall off and stop working and yesterday was no exception. However before I get onto that I must record the sad demise of Squiddly Diddly the pink lure we chucked him overboard in the morning and he was gone by nightfall a sad end and probably reflects our fishing ability that it took us all day to notice! Anyway back to the boat yesterday a cupboard door fell off, a fire extinguisher fell off, door handle came off and the cutlery draw fell out (particularly tune full that one) and we nearly sank. Ok maybe that last bit is a slight exaggeration so here’s the detail. “So” says the crew member reporting back, “engine check done and we still have one plus the indoor pool is warming up nicely.” Those of you who know Itchycoo Park will realise we do not have an indoor swimming pool however a quick inspection of the bilges did reveal about 12 inches of water sloshing about. “Shouldn’t that be on the outside? “ said our engineer. So a quick old manual pump out revealed that the automatic bilge pump had fused so up with the floorboards out with companion way ladder and chaos everywhere and cleared the pump of the bits of string used to hold the emergency bungs to the seacocks which had all come untied. At this stage I would like to record my thanks to one of my oldest sailing mates my very good friend Bob Hudson who I am confident will one day learn to tie a bowline and whose help in initially tieing on the bungs has helped us occupy an afternoon.  Im happy to say that after the crew had a maintenance day everything is back in order and when I say crew I actually mean we all watched Ross fix them.

That’s yer lot folks.

Itchycoo Park out.