23:35.4N 64:30.2W

Continuing to make good progress, averaging 6.94 knots over the 24 hours to 8am local time this morning, though speed is dropping a bit as the wind reduces. The money spent on divers doing a good clean of the hull in Tortola was certainly well spent.

We are not sure of the exact latitude of the tropics (and google is not online} – 23:30N, or some other minutes? – but either way we are leaving them today which is a shame and we will be leaving the trade wind belt tomorrow and getting more into the Atlantic frontal systems, so progress will probably not continue to be so smooth!

The fishing gear was out for a few hours yesterday when we were probably going too fast , and back out this morning so we can look forward to catch reports in future blogs ha ha. It seems that Mark is the only angler amongst us, though he only does fly fishing and turns his nose up at our coarse “trawling” fishing , so he is getting his excuses in early for not catching anything!

Bilal is keeping busy trying to stop the various irritating leaks (hatches and lockers, so nothing too serious!)  that RAVEN seems to have developed after 6 months in hot weather. He has failed so far to fix the log problem – our speed through the water is showing zero – but we remain confident.

Touching wood as i type, the e mail and IT hassles of the outward leg have been fixed i believe. I had stupidly forgotten that i had changed the DNS settings on my laptop in the Canaries in order to try and get iPlayer, so i had screwed the system up. Fortunately after a lot of testing and fiddling over the last couple of weeks in was able to sort the issue..........so i have saved about 2 hours a day of IT faffing!