Saturday 11 March – celebrating halfway!

Everyone had a much better sleep, it was a much more comfortable night. First thing the men seemed to be enjoying creating all sorts of rope concoctions to try and keep the main sail and Scary Spice in the optimum positions for the wind. The sailing crew would be shocked at my lack of shackle terminology! Anyhow, impressively It seemed to work as we definitely started going a bit faster. It was a day of consistently low teen winds and not a boat in sight, Scary Spice stayed up all day long. Sometimes we see some little black sea birds but no boobies today.

We had Ginger Spice out of her sock and in the cockpit so we were out of the blazing sun shine. Rowan had spotted a few seams were coming apart, so we had to get the whole sail unravelled and find the tears and patch them with some special sticky patches. Quite a few boats are having to do repairs to sails at the moment, according to the chat on the fleet’s WhatsApp group.

It was great excitement at lunchtime when we crossed the halfway distance! Rowan made us some extremely weak gin and tonics, which tasted delicious. It was a very happy toast. We hope to cover the second half in a shorter time, fingers crossed that the wind stays with us.

I managed to find second sheets for all our beds which was another good reason to celebrate! Our damn washing machine still doesn’t work under passage, which is so annoying, we’ve all had to do some hand washing.

The girls are so impressed, day 11 and we are still managing to have fresh salad everyday with lettuce, cucumber, carrots, radish, celery, spring onion, red cabbage and pine nuts! We are also managing to do a fruit salad most days. It is amazing what you can do with a bit of effort, we are still on our first bag of rubbish, we wash all plastic wrappings so that nothing smells, all food stuffs and compostable goods go overboard, and we are on our second bag of recyclable goods including hard plastic, glass and tins. I have a can crusher which reduces the volume enormously.

Repairing Ginger Spice in the cockpit

Our chart shows our half way progression

Han’s artistic photo lookin up to the sky with the grey Main sail and Scary Spice

Chilling in the evening

Gorgeous twilight and sunset