As I type up this report, we are about 24 hours from our arrival at Port Victoria, Mahe, Seychelles - that is if we are not captured by pirates and on our way to Somalia before our arrival in the Seychelles!

The first day sailing north of Madagascar was not fun. We had gale-force winds from the east, which pushed us well west of our intended course. We also had to contend with a very strong south equatorial current, also giving us a strong push westward. However, once a day north of Madagascar, we started getting the wind from the south-east and could start crawling our way more east towards our intended track, passing just east of Providence Island. But the weather was not as predicted and we had constant winds in the high 20 knot region and squalls pushing the wind well over 30 knots. We were unable to use our mainsail because of this and sailed with our motor ticking over and the Genoa well furled. Not nice!

One thing that we did manage to do when leaving the protection of the Madagascar islands, was to catch a nice fish - a rather large barracuda. We had some of it on our second night out and, I must admit, it was darn good. This is the second time in my life that I have eaten a "cuda" and had forgotten how good a fish it actually was.

During last night (Wednesday night), we sailed out of the squall "belt" and at 01:30 I woke Dylan up and we hoisted our main, leaving two reefs in just in case we still encountered any remaining bad squalls. The nights have been well overcast with no moon and it has been impossible to even determine where the horizon is. Coupled with this, we have been sailing "black ship" (no navigation lights on) at night as our anti-piracy measure.

We are all looking forward to our arrival and hope to be back in Cape Town mid next week. I will post another update after our arrival in Mahe and then close the blog until the next delivery. Cheers to all for now - greetings from Dylan, Richard and myself, John