14:34.14N 56:09.67W

Monday 15th December.

Good evening to you all. It is Saturday evening and my watch has just begun. We have been sailing for more than nine hours under spinnaker alone achieving speeds to 7 knts.It has been a wonderful day ,a little cooler than yesterday with a light covering of sparse cumulus nimbus clouds keeping the temperature down a degree or two. The forecast was for the trade winds to be disrupted and they certainly were for twenty four hours but today they have been blowing steadily from the east at 12/15 knts.As can be seen by our longitude we are now a 56 degrees west, just another five degrees to St Lucia and 270 nm.to our west.

It is now 00:20 UTC and 22:20 local (Zulu) I will put the clocks back a further hour in the morning and another hour when we arrive in St Lucia, Eastern Caribbean time is four hours behind U.T.C/G.M.T.

In the late afternoon Bob had a tug on the fishing line, a ten pound Tuna no less, It was gaffed by Dave and brought on board, this beautiful fish was photographed before being cut into steaks and cooked and served at dinner by James, having been lightly fried in olive oil and served with Penne pasta and Pesto sauce with fresh squeezed limes over the top, what a meal! This was followed by white pears and custard as a treat. As you can tell life is getting tough out here. A real team effort.

Dave’s wife and two children left Eastbourne at 05:00 to drive to Gatwick and fly to St Lucia for their Christmas holiday, they hope to meet their dad when he arrives, it won't be long now Ryan and Jade, and we are almost there. It seems a little strange that they have travelled the same distance in just a few hours that has taken us more than three weeks.

On the SSB this morning we had a distress alert for a yacht some three hundred miles behind us that was running out of food and water and the nearest yacht turned around to rendezvous with him and assist.

The moon is now one night passed full, but rising quickly in the eastern sky directly over our stern, the stars are appearing one by one. The first to show is Venus; I think I can spot Riga to the south and the group known as Plough to the south east.

This has been our twenty first day at sea and I think we will all be glad of some shore leave, Dave and his family are spending two weeks in St Lucia until the new year, Nick has to return to the U.K. on the 18th and James flies to Puerto Rico, Los Angeles and Melbourne on the 22nd.Bob and I fly out to cold, wet, Gatwick on the 23rd .I am sure we are all looking forward to Christmas with our loved ones. What of Libertad, She will be locked up for just a few weeks here in Rodney Bay, Bob and Lynne return on the 1st Feb to spend a few weeks in paradise

I will return on the 2nd March with Tim and Sarah to sail down to St Vincent, Mustique, and the Tobago Keys before turning north and island hopping to Martinique, Dominica, Antigua, St Kitts and Nevis and The British Virgin Islands.

My Mother has been very ill of late with a prolonged spell in hospital, she has recover to some extent but is still very frail, we will be celebrating her 90th birthday on the 7th January 2009 another reason to be home for a while.

Well I think that is about all for today I will write some more tomorrow.

Love and best wishes, Paul (Libertad)