You may be wondering what has happened to us, so let me explain. We departed Luderitz last Saturday with our new engine purring away. However, as we put on miles, motor-sailing due to very little wind, the engine started sounding a bit rough so we contacted our Cape Town office and were instructed to go to Walvis Bay, the largest port in Namibia. This we did, arriving on Monday morning.

Now let me explain Namibia to you. It is a fairly large country which consists mainly of desert with diamonds producing a majority of it's income. However, it is rich in fish on the coast and the two main ports, Luderitz and Walvis Bay, have large fishing fleets that operate out of the ports. Both ports have a yacht club which consist of a few sailing boats but mostly being a social club with large bars. Cruising yachts do visit occasionally but the infrastructure for repairs to engines on small sailing boats basically does not exist and there is little help from the local marine engineers - they work on massive ship engines, not little yacht engines! So, we now have a local engineer with another (imported from Cape Town) giving "direction" in the correct way to tune and have the engine properly set-up, something I wish they had done whilst we were in Luderitz.

We have been so busy, it was hard to keep the blog updated but, we departed yesterday (Thursday) and are now heading for the South Atlantic island of St Helena and then on to the northern coast od South America. The South Atlantic sea state at the moment is very rough with the three metre swell hitting us on our port beam, making conditions rather like being in a washing machine and making the typing of this report also a bit hit-and-miss. In the next 48 hours we should have both the wind and seas more from the southeast, not from the southwest as we have at the moment.

I will attempt a further update in a couple of days to keep everybody updated as to our progress. Regards from Hardy, Andries and myself, John