Mrs Blog is having a day off today so Captain Bob is going to try to give you an idea of what it is like out here.  Here is about 100 miles from Portugal and 350 miles from Porto Santo a little island 20 miles from Madeira which is where we are heading.

Imagine if you can that you are sitting in the middle of a very large dinner plate.  The rim is your horizon and it is totally empty of anything except lots of seawater and very occasionally, a seabird or pod of dolphins.  Except for Windy there is is no sign of man or man’s endeavour to change everything that he looks at.   Underneath us at present is 3,000 metres of water but we will be passing over submerged mountain ranges that in one place peaks to 20 metres below the surface.

But of course the sea is never still.  We are travelling across the general swell where the waves are probably a metre and a half high and roll by every 15 seconds giving us a constant up and down movement. Amongst these bigger ones are lots of little ones that add the uneven motion. The boat is heeling over from the vertical to about 20 degrees as the wind strength changes.  I am sitting in the cockpit on the windward seat with my feet, wedging me in, on top of the windward seat.  Down below its very much one hand to hang on with and one hand to do whatever you are trying to do.

Mrs Blog, our chef, has worked wonders down there in front of her wildly swinging stove.  She does her prep work up in the cockpit where onions are peeled and chopped together with carrots and potatoes, then into the pressure cooker with whatever meat is on the menu and a little later on the most wonderful Lancashire hotpot appears in a bowl with a spoon , to be eaten in the cockpit because we we are not quite ready to eat below yet.  A miracle.

For those interested in such things, we are sailing along on a beam reach with a 20 to to 24 knot wind from the NW doing a steady 6.5 knots and more over the ground.  Windy loves this sort of sailing.  We have in mast furling which is proving a huge benefit.  We roll out as much as we think is prudent, at the moment we have the equivalent of one reef in, and then roll out the headsail as needed to balance the steering of the boat, at the moment we have about half a dozen rolls in the front foresail. 

At the top of the mast we have a sensor that picks up the speed and direction of the wind which is fed to the autopilot which we can then set to steer within so many degrees of the wind direction.  So most of the time Windy sails herself in relation to the direction of the wind but, of course, if the wind changes directions then so do we. 

Our navigation is done by a combination of electronic chart plotter and paper charts.  Stuart is our GPS chart plotter dependent, fanatic and guru and draws lines and goodness knows what else all over the screens.  Captain Bob sets out his paper and pencil and draws lines on a chart.  We then compare and sometimes engage in long discussions of why they might differ.  Anyway, so far we have arrived at all our destinations that we were aiming for so lets hope we don’t miss Madeira.