18:06.81N 32:54.00W

Wednesday 3rd December 2008

Good morning to all our blog watchers, the wind finally arrived from the south during late afternoon under a leaden sky, we trimmed sail with just the white stuff up, full main and Genoa, The hydrovane doing an excellent job keeping us on a westerly track of 265 degrees. The wind increased steadily to 18 to 22 knots before we reefed both to the first slot for the night watches.

Yesterday afternoon found us drifting along 4 knots to the west trying to work out our arrival time in St Lucia, my money is on January 2009.We hope that another ten days might see us near to the islands, our average speed is now 5:2 knots since leaving Gran Canaria

Bob has broken his fishing rod by stepping on the handle so it is now splinted with a spare piece of aluminium and tank tape. We persuaded him to ease up on the fishing so we could have something different for dinner,

I had been having problems with the main fuel tank gauge not showing any usage, so opened up the engine room to trace the fault, discovering that the sender cable had corroded .It was striped and re connected, bingo, our gauge is now reading just over half full about 200 its used, mostly on the generator having given loyal service for more than fifty six hours, this confirms our consumption of about three and half lts per hour. I am sure these technical details must seem very mundane and boring to you but out here they are vital to maintaining our way of life, apologies anyway, I will try and be more interesting.

Last evening Nick cooked up a Chicken Tika Marsala with popadoms and basmati rice followed by a cheese board with the last of our apples, this is where the teeth start to drop out and we drink sea water  going  maaaaaaad !!!

For entertainment, apart from the odd keel hauling or cat o nine tail flogging we had an evening showing of "Saving of private Ryan “I had forgotten I was on the 8 to10 watch so had to be on deck. As American war films go it is one of the better ones but, always leaves you with the impression that they fought the second world war single handed, I am sure other countries played a small part in the eventual victory.

Whilst the movie was playing on B deck, Libertad was responding to a warm southerly breeze of 15 to 20 knots giving us a pleasing 6/7 knots over the ground,

By 22:30 the movie had finished and the night watch headed for their bunks, it was a close call do we leave up full sail or reef down for the night watches? We left up full sail, just climbed in to my rocky pit and a call came from the cockpit ,wind increasing to 22 knots, Yes you guessed it, all on deck, life jacket on and reef down both, It's sod's law as soon as we had reefed the wind died to 8 knots and stayed there until my morning watch ,by then we had  lost at least two knots per hour. I shook out the reefs and squeezed 5 knots of speed out of the old girl on my morning watch. Despite our poor performance overnight we are looking at a day’s run of more than 135 nm noon to noon. Not so bad, eh!

As dawn broke with an overcast sky we start the day with a brew, used over three hundred tea bags since leaving Eastbourne, thought you might like to know. Then I start up the generator and water maker to keep our vital services going, these will run until our radio schedule on SSB at noon u.t.c. when we report our position to World Cruising in Cowes which will be posted on the Google map. We haven’t seen this as jet, how are we doing compared to the rest of the fleet? At www.worldcruising.com

Breakfast is on the way (bacon roll with HP sauce must go, things to mend crew to shout at, all in a day’s work,

Best wishes to you all keep reading, there will be more exciting adventures of Libertad tomorrow.

P.S don't forget you can catch up on "Bob’s blogs" on our web site at www.libertadcruise.com  if you enjoy works of fiction.