Eat your heart out Apollo 13, Heath Robinson and Blue Peter.  It is amazing what you can do with a jemmy, lee cloth hooks, cling film, sticky backed plastic and a spare can of fuel when you put Bob’s mind to it.  Gerry now has a two way catheter feeding both in and out, bypassing the main filter, is working very smoothly and only consuming half a litre of fuel per hour.  The surgical contrivance is strapped in our shower which means that we are very smelly from the diesel, the sweat and tears of putting together the contraption and inability to wash properly.  A jubilant, if pongy, Bob!

Today is Haley’s 20th birthday.  The Christmas decorations s have been swept away and replaced with balloons and a Lemon Drizzle “boat cake” with candles.  (A “boat cake” is defined as a lopsided, burnt in places, raw in others, rather flat confection (from the boat’s dodgy oven) with the drizzle slipping off the side according to the tack we were on). 

Cross fingers, touch wood and whistle, we are experiencing consistent, classic trade wind weather.  Every day’s Grib file (that we download from Mailasail) shows text book Force 6 winds sweeping across the Atlantic at around 80 degrees.  Mind you, reports from the mini flotilla behind (that left four days after us) are saying that they are having really heavy weather.  (One chap, sailing single handed, hove to for the night to have a break from the giant waves and gale force winds).  Perhaps they have been taking the grib files from the text book! 

With this ideal weather we still get the odd squall.  We can usually see them coming as the weather is so clearly laid out around us.  We can watch little rainstorms chuntering by from miles away.  We got caught out with a good ‘un this morning while the watch keeper was distracted admiring his contraption.  It was a bit like the crash scene in Castaway with an amazing bellowing wind and thrashing rain for five minutes followed by an innocent and sunny “wasn’t me” calm.  An interesting experience.