Hello again world!

Turned off the engine at 0500hrs, as we found some vaguely acceptable wind and continued to sail steadily through the day; we lunched on scrambled egg with chorizo on toast and salad (courtesy of Spiller), washed down with a very pleasant white Rioja. Surprisingly we also made progress on and tracked what turned out to be 2 other ARC yachts and firstly, therefore thank you to Ocean Wanderer (ARC No. 213) for radio help in providing us with a weather up-date. By early evening we had close visual and radio contact with the second yacht, Fryd of Norway (ARC No.195) - who had also witnessed first hand the fiasco we had with a broken throttle cable when trying to leave the marina in Gran Canaria?!) - anyway having explained our new 'lack of comms predicament' to her crew, we established that (very luckily) they had the same 'Mailasail' sat comms provider as us. With Fryd's much appreciated help, a plan was soon hatched to try a wi-fi connection and data transfer; however, when this failed 'Plan B' was a physical transfer of a software disc, which involved the 2 yachts coming alongside and a dry bag containing a copy of the software CD being thrown over for collection. Thankfully this exercise went smoothly (much to the surprise of all on board Mariposa AKA 'Carry on Sailing'!).

A massive thank you to Fryd.......beers on us in St. Lucia. We celebrated this minor triumph with supper of beef curry (courtesy of Willy) accompanied by a nice red wine and some more of that rum / honey liquer on fresh-ish pineapple.

Post supper we are sailing along at a good lick, with heavier wind (c.15 knots), trying out the software CD and blogging. We have also now checked the Fleet Viewer and can report that we are not in very last place!

N.B. We are now told that the trade winds are expected another 5 degrees further south (300 nautical miles i.e. at around 15 degrees north) by the weekend, so we are now beating slightly south west on a bearing of 230 ('Chinese dentist') degrees into the wind, in order to get into position for the west-ward slap.

Rigging is now 'singing' which indicated the boat speed has reached a very acceptable 7 knots.

Good day all round!