I think Michaela is doing it on purpose! At today’s morning handover I was left with an indeterminate glow on the horizon ahead of us. At various times, she told me, they (and Michael) thought it was a rising star, that the GPS had failed and that we were heading for shore lights and other such scenarios. It turned out to be a drilling rig – the first of a number of them. They were all widely dispersed so presented no problem to us.

 

The towing generator hasn't been working so after sunrise I cleaned the plug and socket terminals on the aft deck but to no avail. It clearly needs a larger dose of looking at so it will have to wait. We tried sailing without the engine but we couldn’t make better than 025 degrees which takes us on to land so after an hour and a half or so we returned to motor sailing. This is a motor-sailer after all and M & M only have a limited amount of precious holiday time so why not make life easy?

 

With the motor running we held 7 knots for a while in the night – pretty close to our hull speed I think with an average for the day in excess of 5 knots. We have another one to two days of motor-sailing if there is no change in the wind direction. No ETA yet.