We were still making good progress in the morning and still in the right direction. The weather is much the same – cloudy with sunny spells and the swell still impressive. Thoughts are more and more with the end of our journey.

We hold out no hope of the heron leaving us until we see land and so we thawed out the last of the tuna. As food is short we tried her on some cut up anchovies which we added to the bowl with the tuna pieces. She wasn’t fooled and ate the tuna really quickly and then just flicked the anchovies around the cockpit and to think we had foregone these on our pizzas to feed her! Fortunately Andy had prevented the escape of a flying fish during his watch last night and so we think we have enough food to keep her going until Antigua. Today we managed to cut the object from her right ‘ankle’ –we wonder if she was tied up with this at some time. On closer inspection we are still not too sure if it is twine or something aquatic she had picked up whilst feeding on a reef.

Food for the humans was a bit repetitive too. I found we had two pita breads left so food at lunchtime was pita pockets with cold chilli-con-carne, cold pizza and some left over salad with olives. It tasted good anyway. The heron is a nuisance at food time and tries to get into the saloon. She doesn’t like any of the food we eat but I suppose she doesn’t know.

We had a jolly afternoon in the cockpit (with Bernie telling us stories about his time in the navy) until the skipper appeared from below and told us we were going to have to do a test on the safety issues he had briefed us on at the beginning of our trip. We were each given a piece of yellow paper and a pen and our hearts sank just like at school when the teacher sprung a surprise test on you and you realised the outcome might not be good. Skipper said it was to provide him with feedback on how well he had done the briefing. Sadly the first question was to name seven things in the Damage Control Kit. We had been advised to look at this at the time of the briefing but somehow I didn’t get round to it. Being a girl was no excuse, apparently, for not knowing the right name for some of the tools. Fortunately Andy didn’t fare much better than me on this question . We both ended up with 10 out of 17 and Bernie did better than us. Hopefully we won’t need the kit before we get to Antigua but at least I now know where to find a rubber hammer.

Dinner was mainly out of tins – we had a cottage pie – or rather Gite pie as we had garlic mash on top and herbs de Provence in the meat. For desert we had a peach and almond charlotte. The second bottle of gas ran out as the pie was cooking so we were a bit late with dinner.

It had been a good day.