Well it’s 0845 and we have just over 200 Nm to go. Which, considering our speeds dropped a bit from yesterday, realistically means tomorrow night sometime….. Assuming it doesn’t drop further.
The boys are keen to get in and join the ARC’s final revelries. It would be good to see a few people again before the all split and go their separate ways for Xmas. Many seem to be heading south to the Grenadines others north to Antigua. All in all the change would be nice.
Looks like the boys have secured a Xmas fortnight back on Skyelark as their charter wasn’t full. Paul will be leaving the boat and heading back to Luxembourg for Xmas. Us, well we’ve done some reading on St Lucia and it seems there’s enough to explore there for a couple of weeks. So once we’ve sorted out with the next leg when and where we’re meeting them and look into the logistics of that we may well relax in St Lucia. All plans are flexible and all up for debate. I think, until we arrive and have some admin time sorting the basics out, who knows where we’ll be!!
0920 and we have a fish on the line. The line has not been out for a few days as we’ve been travelling so fast. Another dorado, a biggie about 1m, but not our biggest.
It’s our 12th catch and according to the ARC scoring we now have 975 points. There’s already a thirst to get another and break the 1000 barrier.
Lunch of hotdogs and then a dolphin visit set us up nicely for the afternoon. Our watch is 3-6 pm coming off mother watch. And having talked through photos for the blog, we decide to change the sail setting as the wind has gone round to the south (i.e. It’s coming from the south). A beam reach is better for us than goose-winged. It also doubles our speed. Which is a relief as it had died to 3.5 knots, not good for us wanting to arrive tomorrow night…. so we’ve all breathed a sigh, for now …
Spaghetti Bol on the menu tonight. Courtesy of Chris again :0) yummy. Sadly we (well Adam to be precise) raided the grab bag tonight for choccies – pudding!!
Grab bag – this is a bag of stuff that if worst came to the worst, you’d grab it as you left the boat for the liferaft. In New Dawn’s we put:
Chocolates
Water
First aid kit
Hand held GPS
VHF
Sat phone (add as leave)
Passports (add as leave)
Spare glasses for Paul
Flares
Torch
We have our own little one too:
Wedding rings (we remove these at sea, otherwise we get blisters with the rope handling)
Phones
Camera
Spare lenses
Shades
Glasses
Notebook
Pencil
Torch
Suncream
Memory cards
A final canter through our photos to check what we’ve allocated for the blog and for the flickr gallery tonight. Then when we get ashore to a decent internet cafe we can get them uploaded for you all. Hopefully this side of Xmas.