Thursday 4th June,  2015

North Atlantic Ocean  36 56.9N 45 56.6W

Today's Blog by Peter  (Time zone: BST -3.0; UTC -2.0)

Now that we are well into our passage from Bermuda to the Azores shipboard routine has become established.  The weather has been kind the last couple of days and we are sailing in the direction we want to go.

Our day needs to be filled with challenges other than "how quickly can we swap the pole from one side of the boat to the other?"   Sudoku is a popular pastime for the non-crossword enthusiasts but "I did mine quicker than you" doesn't have a lot of kudos.  David has no challengers for his crosswords.  Producing the least / most calorific lunch is a daily challenge where one shoots for the top or the bottom.  Bacon / fried egg roll (David) currently takes the top spot while Terry's salad wraps keep us in trim.

Another keenly contested challenge is being watch leader at  each 100 mile milestone. I got the prize for 1400, 1300, 1200 (miles to go) but we had a fast sail all day yesterday and I lost the 1100 (to Richard) by 2 miles.  Continuing at high speed Richard has consolidated the magic 1000 mile to go mark with 3 hours to go.

Bird identification  is another challenge with not many around. Yesterday dolphins were spotted (Atlantic Spotted variety - as identified by our resident naturalists) and played round the boat for about 15 minutes.  Quite small and cute.

No more fish despite extended trawling though periodically a plastic bottle floats by.  It took some pictures from Terry to convince us these were really Portuguese Man of War jellyfish….