So what exciting things happened today to distinguish it from the rest?  Well, we had pancakes for breakfast and home made pizza for lunch.  Oh, and the sun shone, the Trade Winds blew and the sea was blue.  And we also accomplished our biggest noon-to-noon run of the passage – 179nm – which led to John recalculating our estimated arrival time yet again!

The good news is that the Trade Winds have continued to blow and we’ve been sailing along at 6-8 knots all day and night, sometimes reaching 9-11 knots in a gust or when we surf down a wave.  We haven’t altered the sails – prevented main, poled out genoa – since midnight on December 10^th.  This is keeping our spirits up as we’re all excited about arriving in St Lucia.  In fact, conversation in the cockpit this afternoon turned to what we’ll do when we arrive – surely a sign that this exciting passage is coming to a close.

We’re running the boat on GMT and not slowly adjusting the time as we move westwards.  This is resulting in an interesting intersection of our schedule and daylight.  It means that its still dark at 9am, we have breakfast mid-morning, lunch mid-afternoon and dinner increasingly late – tonight we served a cold platter of roast beef and chicken-in-ginger at 10pm under a full moon.  Alternatively it could be that we’re just becoming increasingly relaxed and laid back as we adjust to island time for our impending arrival.  We’ll swap to St Lucia time (4hrs behind the UK, +4 hours for readers on the US West Coast) when we arrive – this is in fact one of Nigel’s fudge factors to ensure that we arrive Saturday evening “local time”.  Well, as long as it means the bar is still open that is fine with me.

Special credit must go to Iona for making an absolutely fantastic pizza for lunch – crispy freshly baked base, deep juicy topping of cheese & tomato (yes, the last of our fresh tomatoes!).  Eat your heart out Pizza Hut!

In yesterday’s blog Nigel didn’t want to give the impression that most of our time is spent eating but for Nigel today was all about eating!  He awoke at 7am in time to have a cup of tea made for him, retired back to bed to awake just as the mid-morning breakfast pancakes were served; then went back to bed in the early afternoon to – yes, you guessed it – awake just as the late lunch pizza was being served.  Hmmm, is this what they mean by skipper’s intuition?

We don’t now how many people are reading this blog, who you are or where you’re located – we’d love to hear from you and you can always reach us at oboe {CHANGE TO AT} mailasail {DOT} com.

Jeremy