No, not Terry stomping on flying fish with his size 11 shoes, but two nice sized Dorado in one go. We were meant to put our lines out on Sunday but, due to Sunday being a day of rest, only put them out this morning (Monday) at 6 o'clock. As the ships bell chimed 8 o'clock both pegs on the aft rail snapped at the same time and we had the two Dorado pictured above. Fish for dinner tonight again!

Yesterday we were only able to fly our spinnaker for a few hours due to rain squalls passing us on a regular basis. Each time one of the squalls gets within a few miles of the boat, we have a dramatic wind shift which would back the spinnaker and most likely leave us with a huge rip in it as it wrapped itself around the forestay. Not what we want! So, we have sailed with the jib and occasionally one engine when the wind strength drops too much. The result is a drop in our daily noon to noon runs, which we will make up for when we reach the Brazilian coast.

In the mean time life on board is quite boring! A lot of reading is taking place with myself reading a book on the life of plants, including their sexual conduct - stirring stuff! It really shows how board a person can get for me to read such a book. Thanks to all the Hams back in Cape Town for donating the books and magazines.

Well, this morning I reported our position DTG (distance to go) and ETA for Tortola to the office back in Cape Town, something I do each Monday and Thursday morning. My calculations remain as they were before: DTG Tortola: 3485 nm ETA Tortola: 24 December It looks like we will be spending Christmas in "Hodges Creek", a mosquito infested swamp a few miles east of Road Town in Tortola. I was supposed to be spending the Christmas and New Year period with Joy in the Gifberg mountains near Vanrynsdorp up the west coast of South Africa but, due to the delays in launching and departing on this delivery, that has changed - for the worse.

And a reminder to the folk that visit the blog and find no new report - I only post something when I have the time and thus a day or two may go by with nothing showing up. However, if there is no new report, I do update our position on the map on the right of the page. Just click it, let it load and our last noon position will be displayed. Note that "noon" is not necessary your noon but that of the boat. At the moment we have undertaken three time changes since leaving Cape Town and are presently on UCT/GMT/Zulu time -1 hour or 3 hours behind SAST or 12 hours behind Sydney or 3 hours ahead of the US eastern time. You figure it out to your location!

On that "timely" note I bid you well until the next report. If you would like to know anything from aboard, hit the "Comments" button at the bottom of this report and place a comment on the blog. Deon (ZS1ZL) will pass it on to me and I will reply via the blog or directly to you. Deon also offers the service of emailing you our daily position report - you can subscribe to it by sending him an email to yacht.report@gmail.com requesting the reports.

Regards from Shaun, Terry, Shaheda and myself, John.