Last night was supposed to be an easy night on all of us. It was clear, the sea was nearly flat and we were just motoring. Until around 10PM, when during Maria's watch the boat Cambio came on channel 16 of our VHF radio asking if other boats had seen two parachute flares. Two other vessels had seen them. Cambio and the other boats speculated that they looked liked military flares, more amber than yellow or white. At around 11:10 PM Maria saw an approaching vessel and tried calling him. Our cockpit radio had gotten plugged with salt and was not working properly and while Maria scrambled to find the handheld radio the approaching boat flashed its spot lights at us. The boat turned out to be Cambio!! At the same time a woman was calling the vessel in distress to come in the VHF radio. This gave Maria's watch some excitement on her watch.

It is about 2PM now and we are enjoying a beautiful day except that we continue to motor through these light winds. Our current position is 24.47.03 N degrees of latitude by 66.45.10 of longitude. The bigger boats (55-65 feet long) are about 200-250 miles away from us and only a day or two from Tortola. We are predicting arriving on Wednesday if we keep moving at a minimum of 5 knots. We know that the wind will pick up once we get to latitude 24N and will stay at 18-25 knots for a while. South of latitude 23N the winds are expected to die down. The intensity of the blue ocean around us is overwhelming, with skies featuring clouds that look like impressionistic paintings. The immensity of the ocean is breathtaking and we feel very fortunate to see and experience this.

The sunset was spectacular in the evening, with clouds formed like candy cotton, white, pink, blue and sparkling colors surrounding them. We enjoyed a very nice meal of chicken marsala, with mash potations and green beans.

In the evening roll call we learned that a trof was lying about 60 minutes of latitude south of us (1 minute of latitude=1 mile) and that we will experience winds in the 18-20 knot range. This was good news as we had been motoring all day as the winds were light and variable out of the north, north west. We are now about 400 miles away from Tortola, have travelled over 1,000 miles already, and are estimating that we will have enough fuel and water to get us there. We could motor all the way there if we needed to and this is a very comforting feeling!