Hi Everyone, hope you are all well?

All is fine on the good ship Lilli Mae. We are eating and sleeping well and generally in good spirits despite the continued lack of fish……more on this later. We are into week 2 of our trip and well into our routine. Breakfast is whatever time you wake up but lunch and dinner we have together at around 1 PM and 7 PM ships time (ships time is currently GMT -1 hr). We have our weather briefing normally just before lunch and then we meet early in the PM to discuss rally news. The rally news covers what is happening to other boats and where we are in the line up. Normally we join the ARC-Net role call at 1200 UTC. Those boats equipped with SSB (single side band) radio can talk with each other over long distances and so we meet to have a chat. It is good fun!

At this moment we are speeding along at 8 knots in 15 knots of wind. If you remember the on Friday (25th November) we gybed to head in a more westerly direction to St Lucia. We are still on the same “tack” (same sailing direction and sail configuration). However we are going to gybe again tomorrow to port tack (from current starboard tack).

Our current heading is directly toward St Lucia. However the weather forecast for the 2nd December and beyond shows a large area of low wind which we need to avoid. So tomorrow morning we are heading in a more southerly direction to try and avoid it. We talked through the approach to gybing given the learning over the last week and we know what we are going to do to minimise the time lost in the change.

So what else has been happening? Well the fishing saga continues. Andrew, Michael and Pete have come up with some scheme to catch fish without rods and reels but using the engine hoist, sail rope and the fishing lures we have. I will let you know how this goes!

We all have small jobs to do whilst we are on watch. Here is Emily at the nav station completing the ships log. We try to do this every hour but sometimes we get distracted by other things that might be going on.

Apologies to all if this is upsetting but I suppose we have to include those more relaxing images of life on the boat and here is one of them. Captured today sailing quite fast and enjoying the warm sunny weather.

And after the relaxation …..fruit smoothies! Delicious!

I hope these pictures don’t make you too unhappy!

Anyway, that is it for now. Will bring you more news in the next day or so particularly the results of the "hair brain” fishing scheme dreamt up by the team.

Take care everyone.

Team Lilli Mae