Everything going OK. NE winds 15-18 kts steady although seas a bit bouncy last night. Henry noted that the water jug actually jumped out of the sink and went airborne across the galley. The cabin sole is now very clean! No one really slept very well but we managed. A big 60-footer ARC boat passed us during the evening and they had rigged their jib on pole and didn't want to take it down, so were stuck having to sail almost DDW when they didn't want to. We were doing pretty well staying ahead of them with long runs of 7.0-7.5 kts until we reefed the genoa. We are doing well with voice communications with Chris Parker for weather. He is in Florida and we hear and talk with him clear as a bell.

We are doing well with power management and able to get the battery drain down to 4.8 amps. The new alternator packs a wallop charging at almost 100 amps initially which minimizes the time we need to run the engine. Since we have almost full water tanks, we aren't making water although we have the capability. If I can get the water-powered generator working we can be energy neutral...a big if!

We finally moved past the western most island of the Cape Verdes. We have the chart plotter set up so we can see the islands but it is on the 300 nm scale, on which the picture changes very, very slowly. A little demoralizing but we made good progress last night during the high speed gusts. Rick walked past me a few minutes ago saying he was going to look for the chicken. I took his statement out of context and had this vision of a chicken somewhere aboard. To my relief he was talking about the frozen chicken breasts for dinner.