Day 20

No wind today. No wind forecast for days. Not enough diesel to motor 800 miles. It's not looking good. We motored through the night and then decided to sail during the day. A couple of times we touched 4 knots but most of the time it's been 2.5k to 3.5k under full main and genoa in about 7 knots of wind. Tomorrow and the next day are predicted to be even less wind at around 6 knots. Not good, especially as shore support has now booked Jen and Marcus' tickets out of St Martin for 9th Feb. Surely we should be there by then!!

In the light of the lack of sailing action we have had to look elsewhere. The Sunday Telegraph crossword No 11 has yielded a paltry half dozen clues and we've all enjoyed watching little clumps of the dreaded yellow weed drift serenely by. The one excitement was a 45m sailing boat that ghosted up behind us, past us and disappeared into the distance on a similar track to ours. When we first saw it approaching it was motoring but when it saw us sailing(!) it raised its sails. Initially we saw it on AIS too but they switched that off as they approached so we didn't bother to hail them. In fact we didn't bother to do much except bob along.

We did have an interesting(?) hour long chat about square roots though. The subject arose because the wind strength was "the square root of sod all". I was amazed when it turned out that the square roots of positive numbers less than unity were actually greater than the numbers themselves. How can this be? It defies logic. Abi, please help me. In fact I was so upset by this fact that I went into "Calculus Shock" as I tried to remember my A-Level maths - something about dx/d-zel trending to zero.

At the moment Marcus is reading a book about The FARC which is a guerilla (not gorilla) group from Colombia, Gill and Jenny are playing Travel Scrabble at the same time as steering the boat and I am waiting to see if I can join the nightly radio net.

Gastronomically the Fray Bentos pies had to take a back seat to mung bean salad and 3 carbohydrate curry (rice, potato and sweet potato as greens are now in short supply). Needless to say it was again yummy - so much so that the Marcus even consumed the washing up scraping leftovers that were supposed to be destined for the briney.

Hey ho. A life on the ocean wave.

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