Yesterday we clocked up 163 nautical miles noon to noon - today we managed 179 nautical miles noon to noon. During the night we had variable winds out of the east between 18 and 30 knots, which helped give us the boost we needed. The current is only flowing at about 1.5 knots but even this helped us along.

I was on watch between 9pm and midnight and during my watch saw three ships. One of them had the lights of a sailing vessel, which was moving along on a parallel course to us and overtook us at such great speed that it must have been big and motoring. Shaheda took the jackpot with ship spotting as we sailed just next to a fishing bank that had the lights of four fishing vessels - all four seen at the same time! So, our score card looks like this: Shaheda: 5 Shaun: 7 Terry: 2 John: 4 More scores in the next blog report.

Last night was also a bumpy one as the seas built up quite quickly with the wind. When I woke up this morning, my mussels were sore and stiff - they had obviously been awake whilst I was asleep, fighting to keep me from rolling around in our world of perpetual motion.

The new moon was visible for the first few hours of the night and this should help us with visibility once we get near the Caribbean as, at present, the nights are very dark and at time it is difficult to determine where the sky ends and the horizon is. The only light has been the fantastic starry sky which has been an absolute wonder to watch when on night watch. The amount of 'shooting stars' I saw last night was amazing. This morning the SFI had shot up into the 90's to prove my theory that the two are related.

This afternoon we turn our clocks back another hour as we have passed the 37deg 30min west meridian, taking us now 3 hours behind UTC/GMT and 5 hours behind SAST - if you live in some other part of the world, please do the time calculations yourself! We are also slowly getting close to the equator and have put a bottle of bubbly into the refrigerator in preparation for that occasion.

Well, as Shaheda bakes fresh bread, Shaun is at the helm, Terry is studying electronics for his ham licence and I finish off this blog report, we all wish you well until the next report. John.