Dear All,

All is well in the dark blue world. We are making 6 knots with a decent wind angle, meaning that we are making a fine South West route. Being on watch on channel 16 means listening on a lot of bullshit, with a  particularly fine muezzin calling on his faithful followers in the middle of the night: there is nothing lost when it comes to religious proselytism on the seas.

News from the race: we have been told by so called friends that we were not quite at the front of the fleet. In British words, it goes as far as : “I was expecting you a touch further West”. Well, well, well. Our finely elaborated Southern strategy has not fully paid off as yet, so that we are now building on our even better thought optimum South West refined strategy. Simple minds on board whose names cannot be mentioned would call it Plan B but it would not be nice to have a go at the Starboard watch while they are asleep.

News from the fishing front: no complacent fish but a fine mess with the starboard propeller, meaning that one of us will be on diving duty tomorrow morning. We call it a learning curve, even though we are unsure about who is learning faster, us or the fishes.

News from the galley: food is good, food is simple, food is ham and tomato based with a piece of bread when we decide to go crazy. We have not yet touched the wine cellar, as we have made this most stupid rule that we will only drink wine the day we break nothing... we do not exclude overruling on this and there is clearly a divided front on the subject. The new proposed rule would be that we can drink wine as long as we do not break more than 3 things in a day, that should hopefully give us some leeway. Another possible solution which does not generate quite full support is to separate the officers from the simple sea men and create an officers’ mess. Everyone likes the thought but we have different views on who should be promoted officers.

News from the surgeon’s mate: no injuries to report, the sick ward is currently empty.

To finish with and to break the suspense, we would like to report that we saw no UFO tonight but we will keep watching for their secret landing zone

Sail-ho,

The Port watch, whose members also happen to be candidate for officer’s promotion