A lovely peaceful night at anchor outside Anfi Del Mar, with just the faintest sound of jazz floating across the water from the Radisson Blu. Steaks and an introduction to an engrossing new game called Sequence (by S&B). K was awoken at about 1.00am, cursing Graham for switching on the light; he hadn’t, but the very bright full moon had risen right over our cabin hatch.

Kate now has the boat cold, so she is let off games today. We’re pleased to report that Bibi is now well on the mend.

Yesterday’s blog forgot its fishing update. We’ve started trailing two lures, one from each quarter. When we brought them in, after 78 long miles of fishlessness, we discovered that Steve’s red squid (the bonito-catcher) had disappeared: something had bitten it right off. G will be upgrading this line to NASA-grade Kevlar (or similar), but at least we now have confirmation that red squid is what the fishies really like.

Barracuda’s bottom was given a good scrub whilst at anchor (well most of it anyway) by Graham, a snorkel and a scrubbing brush – hoping to add a bit of speed.

Well, today we’re heading up towards Las Palmas. Anfi is on exactly the other (S-W) side of the island from there, and the wind is due to pick up tomorrow from the north-east, so we thought we would get our northing in today and save ourselves some pain. Well at least that was the plan. So we beat against wind and current making fairly slow progress most of the day. Then we saw the note on the chart telling us that beating against the acceleration zone winds and currents was really a hiding to nothing. So we are now under engine motoring north as the sun goes down with a couple of hours to go till we drop the anchor.

We want to be in Las Palmas tomorrow to watch the start of the ARC+. This is the other part of the rally we are doing – there are two, the ARC and the ARC+. The ARC+ fleet of 70 boats leaves Las Palmas on the 5th November to sail down to the Cape Verde islands for a break, and then departs for St Lucia. Our part of the rally (the ARC, with 200 boats) leaves on 19th November, and goes straight over from Las Palmas to St Lucia - although we will most likely dip down towards the CV islands in order to get closer to the trade winds for the main part of the crossing. Traditional navigation: ‘go south until the butter melts, and then turn right’.