10 PM

Well the prawns had quite a bit of fresh chile in them so they weren’t really Greek either.  Nik has been taking some special medication for his sinus but I think the prawns did more to loosen it up than the medication. He was certainly using several tissues.

It’s decidedly colder tonight than it has been for some time.  You need a proper outerlayer in the cockpit and not just because of the spray. We are motoring into a 20 knot headwind.  The sea has got up a bit and sometimes we are stopped almost dead in our tracks.  The engine’s only doing 1800 revs and we’re making a little better than 6 knots. I don’t want to push it harder as we’ll only slam more. Things should get better in 24 hours or so, i.e. the wind should go a bit more East at first and then even North. Allegedly.

7/1/08 6AM

The wind moderated overnight and now we are only punching into a 10 knot head wind, boat speed is up to 8 knots, the sea is down accordingly, so I slept better than expected. We are passing Florianopolis where we would have had to check out if Paranagua hadn’t worked. The entrance is very deep and it would have cost us at least another 30 miles, although I was curious as to what such a Greek sounding place actually looked like.  As always we have to press on.  It shouldn’t be that way, but our Antarctic window is very specific and we’re already a bit late.

12:00 Noon

Wind still very low.  It teased us for a little while going NW to NE and is now ESE.

The 24 hour run was 173 miles, all but 4 ¾ hours under power.  533 miles to go.

I will attach the Christmas decoration pics.