Day 18

Slowly slowly catch a monkey........... but still no fish!

Sloshing around in 10 knots of wind today we've tried a number of sail combinations: main alone, poled out genoa and hanked on genoa, poled out genoa, now back to the main (late amendment - back to poled out genoa for the night) getting us slowly, slowly towards our destination to lesser or greater degrees. The benefits of this is that there is a lot of time for chatting, crosswords, reading, napping and eating between bursts of activity but the downside is the miles tick only slowly past.

In better progression news, another reasonable night saw us pass the 2000 mile mark and we now have just under 1050 miles to go. Dad has been counting us down by the mile today - not sure if this is going to continue all the way or not.

Last night was just lovely, calm, warm-ish (only two fleeces under the wet weather gear) and clear. Dad and I spent ages looking at the stars and consolidating our newly learnt constellations whilst having a midnight feast of ham leg and olives with anchovies! Good times.

Thanks to Wombat for the second of our team presents - the bag of crisps will no doubt make it's way to the night-watch snack hanging basket and I should think they won't last long!

Fresh provisions are beginning to run low - we ate our second-to-last mango today and there are only a handful of oranges left. This said, Marcus provided us with an excellent tea of smoked salmon pasta (no fresh fish yet) and we still haven't repeated an evening meal!

We forgot to mention yesterday in the excitement of the whales that WE SAW A SHIP!! And not just on AIS, but passing in clear view across the horizon. We think it was the first ship we've seen for 14 days! You know you're short of external stimuli when everyone scampers up to get a glimpse of passing civilisation.

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