You can probably tell how much I have settled in to a place by the presence or absence of blogs and I had settled into Gibraltar so didn't really think about writing. Hence the dearth of blogs for a month and a sudden frenzy of catching up.
We left Gibraltar on 12 December with what seemed a good weather window. A little light on the wind front but it was no bad thing motoring out of the bay and across the strait. Actually, the strait was a lot less scary by day, in the sunshine. And very quiet too. Obviously all the tankers had saved themselves up for our arrival.
The wind came out for about three days and we made good progress down towards the Canaries - Lochy caught another tuna, Mia gutted it - that's my girl!!
On the night of 14th December, there is an unbelievable show of shooting stars - it is literally raining with them. Every 10 seconds you could see 1 or even 2 at a time. Mark's Focus magazine tells us that it is debris from the astroid Phaethon - which we had naturally thought all along (in fact Lochy commented "Mummy, isn't that debris from the astroid Phaethon?") but it was nice to be confirmed!
On the Thursday, the wind died right down and we had to motor again, however we worked out that we would arrive at night, so we slowed right down, even turning round to follow a turtle for a few minutes. We also threw another fender overboard and this time got the kids to manouvre the boat to retrieve it.
In hindsite, it would have been better to have caned it down as fast as we could, even if that meant arriving after sunset as the winds came round onto our nose and picked up to 30 knots. The narrative in our log book read "lumpy" and "choppy" and "YUK YUK YUK" which pretty much described the last 12 hours of the trip. However, once again, the kids slept right through, Mia waking up at 9.30am to say "have we arrived, then?"
This was the first trip that no one felt sick - Mia was bouncing around the boat from the whole trip and we managed to do lots of school work - mental stuff like timestables, spellings etc, so that we can have a break when Grandma arrives.
I can see on the internet that my mum has made it to the the UK - Jersey airport having been closed all day yesterday, that's a huge relief - and we are really looking forward to her arrival tomorrow - so, please don't snow in the UK tonight - I really want to see my Mummy!
Speak soon, love Catherine x