The winds came in yesterday but the sea state was nothing like earlier in the week, it was relatively smooth and most of the day we had bright sunshine so we surfed along very quickly which was good.  Sleeping at night was not quite as good – it sounded like a hurricane going on with the boat being carried along on the waves even though up top it was actually quite smooth and calm.  Adam saw another whale about 100 metres off the boat.

 

Overnight Adam went through the Front and got rained on solidly for 2 hours whilst I slept, we had a couple of hours of very little wind but thankfully we now have a reasonable amount so have poled out the headsail so we can go straight downwind,  we have to try and stay in the wind for the next few days as there is a section of no wind south of us which is moving north so we have to try and stay ahead of it.

 

Sea temp is down to 18 degress C – it was 29.5 when we set off from St Maartin 2 weeks ago!! and it’s now about 20 during the day – brrrrrrr – we even put the heating on in the boat this morning to warm it all up and dry it out as the air is very damp right now, heating hasn’t been on for almost 2 years.

 

We did hear from Stokey yesterday that a lot of the boats who did a more northern (and more conventional) route than us got an absolute pasting in the gales up there with many crews flying home from the Azores and leaving the boat (hope they left room in the marina for us!) – so glad that we edged along on the south and have managed to stay out of any strong winds for all but about 3 hours to date, and the winds we were in weren’t a gale.