Hi All, We have been motoring along at a snails pace for the last few days. We have very light winds from the SSE and we are traveling NW which means the wind is right behind us. This should be okay to fly the spinnaker and give us some more speed, but! We are having cloudy skies with lots of rain squalls coming through. These last for 10 - 30 minutes and the associated low pressure pulls the wind in odd directions making it impossible to control the spinnaker. So it is light winds and slow sailing for us in the meanwhile.

We started the ship spotting competition a few days ago, we each mark the number of ships passed during the voyage and when we get to Barbados we will add up and see we saw the most. The winner of this competition gets a bottle of Caribbean Rum. Something to look forward to I'd say. It seems we South Africans just cannot beat the Aussies at anything. I was determined to see the first ship, but it was not to be Terry spotted the 1st ship during his watch this morning at 8.00am our time (UTC-1). So that's his name on the board, we have to see if we can pip the Aussie at the number of ships spotted, but who knows :-)

Yesterday morning, I put the fishing lines out at the start of my watch, which was at 6.00am. Within 2 hours we had both line trip and started to reel in. John grabbed the line on the starboard side and Terry grabbed the line on the port side. I frantically started looking for the tail loop and the cloth we use to cover the fish's eyes when we pull it out of the water. This subdues them and they are a lot easier to handle. On the hooks were two beautiful dorados. No prizes for guessing who grabbed the line with the biggest fish on! What is it with these Aussies. Terry filleted the fish, it was the first time I had ever seen a darado in the flesh (pardon the pun). The meat is very light and the bone structure is similar to the snoek we catch down in Cape Town. This bone structure makes the filleting technique somewhat different to the tuna as it has a very knobbly back bone and it is difficult to cut close in. Terry had a bash at the first one, I must confess that it looked more like butchering than filleting to me. I did the second smaller one and tried the technique that the snoek vendors use who sell snoek in the streets of Cape Town. I think this worked a treat and produced better fillets than Terry's, we have to beat the Aussies at something!

Shaheda took a turn at cooking and prepared the Darado fried dusted with spicy flour, some portions curried. This along with some fresh cut tomato and pasta with mayo worked a treat and really went down well.

We have finally passed the 1000 km to go point toward our next waypoint. This means that we are approximately halfway between St. Helena Island and the coast of Brazil. We are hoping for better weather over the next few days so that we can put the spinnaker up and hopefully make some decent mileage under sail. We will keep you posted of our progress and don't forget to look into John's blog for some of the nice pics.

Until next time regards from all on board with love.