The 'day' began ...

... with serious concern about squalls particularly after poor Juno's encounter with one, so for hours in the middle of the night Duggie skipper and Julian first mate were rushing up and down from the commanders cubby hole checking how the squalls approaching us looked on the radar.

Thank goodness this can see rain clouds and there was a vicious looking one at a mile or so away from us for some time. There was endless discussion about whether we should drop our spinnaker in anticipation. Meanwhile the crew were on tenterhooks sitting in the cockpit with adrenalin rushing around our systems at an exhausting rate. We each had our allocated place by the rope for which we were responsible in the dropping routine.

Our chosen routine is the 'letter box drop' which involves the deflated spinnaker being pulled through the gap between the mainsail and the boom; the red rope which controls this is now not unnaturally called the post office rope. Anyway the vicious looking squall turned out to be a little rain with no dramatic wind so the spinnaker stayed put. Much as we would have liked to put our much verbally rehearsed skills into action, on balance having the spinnaker still set and in tact was the best outcome.

Today has been a washing day with various clothes emerging from the washing bucket to festoon the guardwires. Clearly we are all getting ready for our halfway party to be held when we have only 1000 miles left to go to Barbados, which we hope will be tomorrow afternoon.

Cakes are being planned and rumour has it that there may be a bottle of bubbly secreted on board for this occasion !

Otherwise it has been a fairly quiet day with a little less wind than we like - it would only take a little more for the boat to be surfing down the swells but we can't complain - lovely sunshine, a few flying fish to watch and even the odd Shearwater skimming the wave tops. We hope the dolphins will remember about us tomorrow, or a whale or turtle would do....

Tom