As I write, we are 160 miles away from St. Lucian shores and, assuming we keep the winds we have, by lunch time tomorrow (4PM London time) we should be on dry land.

It's been another interesting few days. As expected, by Thursday evening last week we finally lost our wind and despite our best efforts to sail through into Thursday night it was clear that we weren't going anywhere fast! Our dilemma however was that with 450 miles to go we only had enough fuel for 160 odd miles - how to keep moving as much as we could without running the engine dry?

Our decision was to head south; whilst adding 80-100 miles to our journey we knew that our fuel situation dictated that we needed wind as quickly as possible. All the forecasts that we'd received suggested 36-48 hours of calm but winds then slowly returning from the south. Having made this decision we finally admitted defeat with the sails on Friday afternoon and turned on our engine. By reducing our RPM we managed to motor throughout the rest of Friday, all of Saturday and the early hours of Sunday morning.

During this calm period we had time to winch Neil up the mast to re-run the halyard to the Parasailor that had been cut in the squall a few days prior as well as fix one or two other things on board, it was a chance too to get a little more sleep than normal as only one person at a time was required on watch.

Having headed as far south as we felt we could (south of St. Lucia at this point) we turned west again, finally come Sunday morning we felt we had just enough wind to hoist the Parasailor and get sailing again - whilst it has almost been our downfall previously the Parasailor was certainly our saviour this time. We managed to fly the Parasailor through the night (this time without any drama) and are now enjoying what we hope is our last full day at sea - we are all very ready for dry land.

Our first sighting of land may in fact not be St. Lucia but Barbados, our southerly route means that we will pass within 20 miles of the island, once we pass Barbados though we will know that we're within 12 hours of St. Lucia.

It's been an eventful and unforgettable three weeks at sea (plus the week before in Las Palmas and the extra week at sea for Gary, Keith and Neil from Portugal to Las Palmas). We've all had moments of loneliness, terror and hilarity and days with nothing to do but look at the sea through to days that are non stop and full of action - hopefully the blogs have helped share a little of what we've been up to.

We will send another update once we're on dry land and settled back into a 'normal' routine. For now though, another 24 hours or so at sea, long overdue reunions with loved ones and a hot shower await.

It's been one hell of an adventure!

Canapesia.