Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 7)

Our midday to midday run today was predictably our slowest yet, averaging just 5.4 knots. However, those extra few knots of wind arrived mid-morning and, since then, BV has mostly been sailing at 6-7 knots and so we should see some better mileages from now on.

The weather has continued to improve too. We've now got about half cloud cover of fair weather cumulus and the visibility is definitely much better as well but we haven't seen any other vessels recently, not even on AIS. The 1/2 blue sky has turned the sea a deep blue and it's an awful lot nicer not having everything grey and hazy. BV still needs a mega-clean but hopefully the daily rain showers in the Caribbean afternoons will help to wash off some of the red dust in the areas we can't reach. The reduced cloud cover has also allowed us to take some more sunsights. Nicky was on nav duties today and from her morning and noon sights calculated our position as just 8 miles from where the GPS reckoned we were.  All very clever when ultimately all you are doing is looking at the height of the sun above the horizon sometime in the morning and then again when the sun is at its highest (meridian passage).

Today’s baking success   

The bread I baked on Friday was a great success (though I say so myself!) and the smaller loaf actually works well, being pretty much what we eat in a day. So, it looks as if daily bread production will now be part of the routine [Ed: just as well I stocked up on so many packets of tortilla wraps then!]. We run the watermaker for about an hour every alternate day to keep the water tanks topped up to full and run the generator daily for 45 minutes to heat a tank of hot water and to give the batteries a boost. However, now that we are going a little faster the Duogen, which we tow behind us, should look after all of our battery charging needs.

Our flying fish haul last night was just the one, which we attribute to the fact that the moon is now nearly full so that the nights are very bright - it's almost like daylight at times. The kamikaze fish that did arrive on board arrived in some style, smacking me hard in the shoulder whilst I was sitting harmlessly on the cockpit coaming minding my own business. It must have been about 2m off the surface of the sea when it hit me!

And so, given that we are 3 hours behind most of those of you who will be reading this, we should sign off here by saying that we hope you all have a great New Year's Eve celebration in a few hours' time.  We're certainly looking forward to it, partly for the novelty value of celebrating at sea but mostly because we should also be toasting passing the half-way point in the passage.  If we manage to keep up this rate of progress we'll be celebrating Nicky's birthday in Barbados!

Position at 0001 Sun 31 Dec: N15 44 W041 09
Distance run 1159-1159: 136nm (25 hours because of change in time zone)
Distance run 2359-2359: 149nm
Distance run so far: 963m
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 1082nm

End of Day 7 position