Happy Birthday Samuel!!... Samuel is my adorable nephew who is 9 years old today so this blog is dedicated to him. Hopefully the rest of you lovely readers will enjoy it too!

 

After a long day of tactical motoring south we were finally rewarded with the wind picking up during the night. Skipper Matt’s long hours of weather examination have truly paid off with reports of some boats likely to hit storms up north, many giving up for now and heading into the Cape Verde islands & others wallowing down south.

 

I don’t think we have explained our watch system to you folks at home so here goes... we have 2 watches, imaginatively named ‘heads’ & ‘tails’ (guess how we figured who was doing the first watch!!) During the day the watches run for 4 hours – 8am to 12noon, 12 to 4pm and 4 to 8pm, then overnight they switch to 3 hour watches – 8 to 11pm, 11 to 2am, 2 to 5am and 5 to 8am. So with an uneven number of watches the teams swap the watches they do each day... get it? ...Oh well, you don’t need to!!

 

Anyway, tails (Niki, Fabio & David) were on watch 11pm-2am as the wind came up. Mike, the first mate, was with us watching the wind increase but the mantra here is keep watching, have a cup of tea, watch some more and have another cup of tea and finally several cups of tea down the line decide if your going to get he sails up! (Same thing applies to taking reefs out!) Skipper Matt was up mid-watch and just before 2am agreed (without copious amounts of tea on his part!) that it was time to try sailing again – hurray!! Sails successfully set and with about 13 knots of apparent wind and we steaming along at around 7 knots

 

This continued right through to mid-afternoon today with just the odd dip, mostly due to helming, so we were all on extra lessons for helming with no land to point at this afternoon! Sadly it has now died again but we live in optimistic anticipation of soon reaching those elusive trades.

 

On the fishing front we had some excitement just before lunch time but perhaps we weren’t due yet more fish on the menu as we lost it before we managed to reel it in.

 

So Samuel, I wish you and your expert helming were here – you’d be loving it! I hope you’ve had a wonderful day and look forward to speaking to you all in a couple of weeks time.

 

Lots of love from all of us to our family & friends at home.

Niki x