Today's midday position (in the title) gave us a run of 175 miles over the previous 24.  We actually sailed a dog leg, in order to reach a favourable current, so it would have been more mileage if we had measured the actual distance covered, rather than between two waypoints.  Anyhow, this is still not a bad day's run and we are now one third of the way to Flores in the Azores.  Currently we are still enjoying a SW wind, force 4-5 and are using spinnaker and full mainsail.  Alberto, now upgraded to hurricane, seems to be staying away.

 

Our GPS chartplotter looks like this when it is fully scrolled out.  The boat is shown in the top left corner, with a yellow arrow indicating wind direction. 

 

 

Next to the boat symbol is a red triangle, which is the position of some new sea mountains.  They are not on any charts and we heard about them via a friend.  Apparently one flat calm day a boat was motoring along with no wind and suddenly the alarm on his depth sounder went off.  He assumed there was a big fish underneath the boat.  Surprisingly, it continued sounding, so he looked over the side.  He could see the sea bed!  He had only 18 feet of water beneath him.  Anyhow, articles have been written about this and the weather forecaster mentioned it recently.  We will track well to the north of the area, although this is difficult to see on the photo above, because the distances are so compressed.  In summary, we are heading for the red cross in a box.  After that we will be heading for the red cross in the top right of the screen, which is Flores.

 

The photo above clearly shows the route we have taken from the Caribbean to Bermuda.  On long passages we put in a waypoint (red cross) on the chart at midday each day. From Bermuda (where we turned right) it can be seen that there are two red crosses, plus one more underneath the boat symbol, marking our three full days of passage so far.

 

There have been more Connect 4 challenges and Alice and Pip are getting pretty good at it, often beating the adults.

 

 

During the night we saw our first shipping of this trip - two large tankers, probably on their way to Florida.  This morning we had dolphins playing nearby, but they did not stay for long. 

 

We have eaten all the fresh bread we brought with us, so Juliet made some at lunchtime which went down very well.  The sea swell has reduced (as a result of our finding a following current) making cooking a more pleasant experience.  We had to change the gas cannister at the start and were relieved that the replacement propane that we bought in Bermuda works well in our cooker.  Otherwise we might have suffered with no means of cooking or making tea/coffee etc.  There certainly would have been a new impetus to catch fish for sushi.  Don't mention the fishing!  Actually, there is nothing to mention.