Finally heading South

I had a wonderful lie in until the sun shining on the bed made it so hot I just had to get up. We haven’t seen another boat in over 24 hours, we are definitely on the less travelled route, I know Corona Virus has stoped most yachts sailing, but I expected a few more tankers. We sailed straight through the night and we only needed to run the engines to top the batteries up a little (to power our many bilge pumps, main fridge, drinks fridge and freezer!). Sadly Rowan is very disappointed with the Solar panels, they are often in shade in their current position, and also annoyingly obscure our view out the back. He had always wanted panels on the roof but they reckoned they came up with a better plan which clearly isn’t the case. We may get them altered if the boat is able to be worked on in Martinique. The bilges have been giving Rowan a little run around but besides that, all is going remarkably well. He is thrilled the wind is behaving and got us so far east, it’s giving him so much sailing pleasure!

Really enjoying reading my next book, 3 Seconds in Bogota, a true story of travels in South America in 1994. Very cleverly written I thought, and brought back so many memories of our 3 month sabbatical to South America in 1992.

We had a lovely long tailed seagull flying round and round us today. I hoped he would land if he was exhausted, considering the nearest land is about 260 miles away, but I think he may have been checking out Rowan’s fishing lures which seem to be catching only seaweed at the moment.

Today we played some more Bridge, we are teaching ourselves and play our partners hand, open. It seems to work quite well for learning how to bid, we only open our partners hand after we bid. Rowan won the first game easily as I had a terrible hand to bid on. He was very surprised when I went up to 2 No Trumps on the second game, and told me that was an unusually high bid…….was I taking this seriously! My luck had turned and I was dealt an extremely good hand, so I was delighted to comfortably make all my tricks! I hope I’m using the right jargon, we have no internet so I’m relying on Rowan’s new found knowledge.

The weather forecast was for the wind to die down to nothing for the next 24 hours and by 7pm we had the engines on. We have finally finished going directly east and we are now heading south. The sea is flattening and all very comfortable even if the engines are on. We safely BBQ’d the last of our delicious steaks from Wholefoods in Fort Lauderdale.

As Rowan was doing the first shift I was early to bed ready to get up at 1am.