Hi everyone, hope you are well?

Onboard Lilli Mae we talked a little about how much we don’t know about what is happening in the world. We hope that you are all still there and that you are all OK.

We are now in day 10 and we have covered 1645 nm. The course length is 2700 but by the time we cross the line we are expecting to have covered 2900nm. As we speak we are heading WSW at around 8 knots after gybing yesterday on to port tack. We timed ourselves completing the gybe which took us 38 mins. Not too bad but we have some improvement ideas that should reduce this time.

This morning (0629 UTC) we passed within 200 metres of another ARC boat in the dark. Despite this huge ocean playground we were close enough to need radio communications to agree how to navigate and to avoid a collision. 

The big (passage) news is the wind and weather.

                             30th November 2022 (with current position) 4th December 2022

The pictures above are shots of our routing models. The left is the forecast for today showing our current and yesterday’s gybe position. The red pin drop is St Lucia. The picture on the right is the projection of wind for the 4th December showing our proposed position. The areas in blue area the areas on very little (or no) wind. This situation has been described as a “complete failure of the trade winds”. So most all of the fleet, including us, are heading south to stay with the wind. This of course gives a slight advantage to those who are already quite far south. It is going to be interesting in the last couple of hundred miles. We are currently looking to arrive late of the 8th or early 9th December but who knows!

Here is the round-up of news onboard the good ship Lilli Mae -

Still no fish. I think the score is 8 to nil (caught and landed). I think there is going to be very little chance of changing this on the basis the revised scheme has yielded zero. Thanks to everyone for their expert advice or sympathies or sometimes both! Such was our fishing disappointment we went fishing for weed just so we could say we caught something! 

We had bacon sandwiches for lunch today. Here is Emily getting the bread from the ships bread-bin!

And here we are celebrating half way. I think it was an early morning tot (yesterday) of the Canaries Honey rum that we have grown to love!

And for some of us today was a washing day! No shortage of wind for drying and no neighbours to complain about hanging out "your smalls"!

That’s it for today. Will send another update in a couple of days.

All the best to everyone.

Crew aboard Lilli Mae.