38:34.0N 36:49.5W

Distance run 97 nautical miles.

We’ve experienced quite a mix of conditions in the last few days. On Monday we had a flat calm, occasionally broken by a dolphin or two. Crew morale took a bit of a dive (note to the sensitive reader: don’t worry – it comes right back up later in the blog).

Late Tuesday afternoon, despite a forecast predicting very light airs for another 48 hours, a breeze sprang up that developed into a very acceptable 10 to 15 knots. We’d like a bit more, of course, but this got us moving at up to 6 knots under main and genoa, and we made good progress overnight and through Wednesday.

The day’s run we reported yesterday was in reality two days’ run – about 100 metres of which were on Monday. Now we’re in variable winds, sometimes making good progress, sometimes almost stalled. This, unfortunately, is exactly what’s expected from the Azores High.

Eventually we may need to turn on the engine. This is a strategy that’s often needed for the final approach to the Azores, although at the moment we’re not close enough to Horta to start motoring.

Crew members reacted to the becalming in different ways.

Paddy immersed himself in constructing ever-more complex charts to explain to his eager but uninformed audience how the whole machinery of the solar system and the galaxy works, and how we can interpret and understand it. We think he should write a book, and by the time we get to Horta he probably will have done.

Allan devoted his time to a new and challenging rigging project: slinging a hammock. After several false starts he settled on working between the davit on the pushpit/taffrail and the boom. With a preventer rigged, that’s not as unstable as it may seem. But a couple of attempts at occupying the rather steeply-angled rig ended with the hammock inverted and Allan on the deck – we think the video will do very well on YouTube.

Richard busied himself with obsessively counting, checking and cross-checking our remaining fresh food. He placed an armed guard on the last tomato and avocado. He also produced a cauliflower-garlic pie with a sheet of puff pastry that managed to survive our fridge and freezer challenges; and Leftover Soup that was quite a lunchtime hit.

Charlie locked himself into the engine-room for hours at a time, struggling with an errant alternator, and occasionally emerging to order up an ever-more obscure tool, gauge or other item. Luckily the soundproofing on the ER doors rendered his muttered assessments of crew competence inaudible.

And so, a few days after our blog saying how little spare time we had, I find myself reporting a day with plenty of it. So much so that we were all relaxing on deck when the cry went up, “fish!” None was on the line (although that was, as ever, deployed) but all around the boat was a school of fine, large, appetizing-looking fish, with various appendages including…yellow fins. How ironic that a quick look at the book confirmed that we were surrounded by a shoal of metre-long Yellowfin Tuna, all having a good laugh and pointedly ignoring the squid-like lure dangling temptingly – as we thought – among them.