36:39N 46:24W

Saturday 30th May 2009.

As the subject indicates we are now past the half way mark and we hope for good winds the rest of the way. Now, more than ten days out from Bermuda should have seen us further down the track .We have been plagued by either too much wind where we have had to reef heavily and thus reduce our speed or insufficient wind leaving us rolling in heavy swell under bare poles.

It is now Saturday evening and we have just had dinner, the crew are washing up and I will say this at the whisper in case the weather gods hear, we have had 10/15 kts of wind from the SSE for most of the day making up for an awful night of little or no wind forcing me to burn more of our precious fuel.

We have again had regular visits from some  Porpoise/Dolphin dancing a pirouette in the wave of the bow. We have not had sight of any other vessel today but we have spoken briefly to a couple of yachts on the SSB this morning.

Dinner tonight featured lamb curry with popadoms, onion and potato Bargi followed by crème caramel / Jaffa cake. So as you can see standards are being maintained. We are settling down now for another night and we hope this is going to put a few more miles beneath our keel.  

Lucien is in the cockpit for the moment with a steady rain falling washing the salt from our decks. Below it is progressively getting colder as we move north and west, we have put the shorts away at least at night and the sleeping bags are being unrolled. It is surprising how quickly it cooled down once we left Bermuda.

The bird life has been sparse with the odd Shearwater looking for any scraps that we might through over. The crew are now looking forward to our arrival in the Azores and a welcome release from Libertad.We have been talking to a French sailing yacht (Austral)  with a husband and wife crew sailing the same route as us but in a much smaller boat of 28ft LOA. Rather him than me!

We have a large tanker/bulk carrier coming from astern and approaching very quickly to pass us maybe a half mile on our port side. I had better go on deck and have a look. Turned on the Radar to track him past us a mile to port. As the tanker  passed us the echo sounder which has been dormant since leaving Bermuda has just sprung into life showing 127ft under the keel, this depth has been constant for several minutes so it is not a whale but more likely  a submarine that is tracking us, one can only assume as part of an an exercise

Well a cup of Cocoa and a good book await me once my watch is finished so until the next time

Best wishes to you all, the crew of Libertad and Paul.