Sunday's blog by Richard 21 07 N 22 15 W

At last!  Been on the boat for two weeks, and haven't seen the big frog until today.  Now he's flying high and raising his Martini to the gentle Atlantic swell.  We've rolled up the double headed rig as the breeze has faded from perfect to near-perfect, and pulled out the classic white spinnaker with the Serendipity logo much larger than life size. 

Having seen the frog in his full glory, I'm now considered ready to write the blog.  And that's also a first - I don't generally do this social tech stuff. 

As you've heard, four days in to our journey, near perfect conditions, no problems, no worries.  Not much to talk about perhaps.  When nothing's going wrong, a sailor's mind tends to turn to food.  Last night, after yesterday's blogster had filed his report, no less than two small dorados took the lurid lure and made it into my gloved hands, one of them in time to contribute his flesh and flavour to our skipper's signature dish - fish pie.   The other was too late and was thrown back to sea with a very sore mouth.    We're not fishing today - it's beef bourguignon tonight.

Another first, we broke out the ice creams today, mid-afternoon.  It's been Bob's bad habit to produce a Times crossword each morning, and until yesterday we've (jointly and severally) got it done by nightfall.  This morning we woke to find half a dozen clues undone from yesterday,  and so this morning we had the dictionaries out and (over four hours) more or less cracked it.  But no new crossword appeared (mercifully) and by our post lunch slump we must have been feeling the lack of verbal stimulus, since a Scrabble board was produced and we managed a dismal game of three-letter words, successful challenges, and low scores.  The ice creams were to cheer us up afterwards.  We must either practice Scrabble and get better at it, or hide the board before Simone gets back on board.

But it's not all fun and games on tour with the big frog:  even as I write, David is busy on deck preparing another sail adjustment, to convert the frog's spinnaker arrangement into an asymmetric rig using his custom-built carbon fibre prodder (it's a boy thing!).  That'll make three different downhill sail plans in one day - and I was promised when we spent half a day setting up the double-header in La Gomera that it'd stay in place for five days.

Now I don't know if the frog has had sufficient mention in the blog to date.  He's really very fine, but must give a misleading impression to passers-by.  We are, after all, a team of tanned, lean sportsmen practising our art on a dry deck and on a nearly dry boat.  What's with the boozy amphibian? If the coastal folk of Mauretania could see over the horizon they could form a wrong impression of us.  Yesterday we crossed the border from Western Sahara to Mauretania, and tomorrow we'll be offshore from Senegal.  An exotic voyage overland, but just a simple downwind cruise for us.

Worth mentioning that last night and today we almost had company.  About a hundred miles behind us we saw another ship on our fancy AIS system that identified itself as a 322 foot sailing vessel.  A superyacht?  With a Norwegian-sounding name and heading for the Cap Verdes.  And overnight it caught up with us fast in the strong winds till it was about 20 miles off our starboard beam at sunrise, but still out of sight over the horizon.  As the breeze has faded during the day, we’ve slowly hauled ahead.  More likely from its current dismal 3.8 knots of boat speed, where we can make 7.8 knots, it’s a square-rigger or suchlike.  Fast enough at 25 knot winds, but struggling at 12 knots.