39:01.86N 23:55.23W

Day 1

We slipped our moorings at 7.30 yesterday morning. It was not an auspicious start. There was zero wind and there was a mild drizzle which kept up most of the morning. We did get a bit of wind in the middle of the day, but this soon died, and the motor had to go on again. A bit of a worry so early on in the passage as light winds were predicted for the next few days and there is a limit to how many hours we can motor. Our worries have dissolved today, however, as we are currently in 20 knots of wind and cracking along at 8 knots, going near enough due North.

The plus side of the lack of wind is that the sea was very flat and the afternoon brought an almost clear, cloudless sky. This meant that we were easily able to spot dolphins and must have had 8 or 9 sightings. Sometimes they were very close to the boat, and played around on our bow wave briefly. Sometimes we could see them way off in the distance, at firsts just flecks of white in the flat water, and then we could see their silhouettes as they moved towards us or just leaped clear out of the water. One was a school of enormous creatures, 3 to 4 metres long. At first we thought they might be some kind of whale, but on looking them up realised that they must be bottle nosed dolphins which can grow to 4 metres in length.

We have already moved our watches on to British Summer Time, which meant that we had a gloriously long evening The sky still was still light at 11.00 p.m.