21:27.8N 19:21.5W

at 0930h 25/11/10

Wednesday 24 November 2010-11-25

In the last 24 hours we’ve had every sail up in every possible configuration.  We started the day running downwind with twin poled out headsails.  As the wind died we swapped to the spinnaker and main, but this was short lived as the wind veered and we couldn’t hold the kite.   So it was up with the light weight Genoa (a bit like a cruising shute).  By mid afternoon the wind had died all together and we had to resort to motoring.  Fortunately a light (6kts) NW breeze filled in during the evening and we’ve been able to feel our way through the night making about 4kts close hauled with the light weight genoa.

It’s now Thursday morning and the wind has strengthened to 10-12kts. We’re sailing nicely close hauled with full sail, main, genoa and staysail making for a point just NW of the Cape Verde Islands, which is the common consensus of the best route to take.  However, there is still a possibility of passing inside the Cape Verde Islands – but we would rather not.

Chatting on the VHF other people have had family wondering why we are so far east but we have all agreed to stick to our plan and head south for the trade winds.

On the IT front Alan has now managed to write a programme so that we can show all the boat positions on our plotter so has out done Marys XY graph!

We saw a whale ‘blowing’ in the distance and Alan heard one ‘blow’ close by at night, although didn’t see it.  Apart from a turtle and another mysterious creature with a fin which made lots of bubbles and water disturbances we’ve not seen any wildlife.  Neither has Toby caught any fish yet, but then there haven’t been many radio reports of fish being caught on other boats other than a 7.5lb mahi mahi by the Nords.  As all fishing reports are generally greatly exaggerated we have to take the lack of reports as true evidence that there really are no fish!!.