27th January

12 31. 343 N
65 46.252 W

Weather; sunny, wind 15- 20 knots ENE, waves 6-8 feet

Well we have weathered our first night at sea and survived. It wasn't a good night for sleeping, we took it in turns to go below and try to snatch a few hours but at the end of the night I don't think either of us got a great deal of sleep, we were rolling around far too much. The wind was pretty constant all night, mainly coming from our starboard stern quarter at around 18 - 20 knots but with some huge gusts up to around 30 knots. We moved along at a cracking pace of 8 knots with minimal sail out. Not much happened during the daylight hours, we grabbed whatever food we could find in a hurry and made do, as trying to delve into the fridge was fraught with perils of all sorts, but never fear we didn't starve and by 6pm it was calm enough to heat up our left over curry - it was just what we needed to keep us going for another night! We had taken it in turns during the day to try and catch up with some sleep as we didn't want to fall in the trap of being over tired and making stupid mistakes. It was too rough to even contemplate having a shower so we made do with brushing our teeth and combing our hair, the shower will be so welcome tomorrow, if its calm enough. We had our first "catch" of the trip in the morning - one dead flying fish - not even good enough for our hitch hiker friend from yesterday. It's strangely quiet on the water, very few ships, I think we have seen a total of 3 today and none of them going our way. We played with the jib a little as our speed began dropping down during the day and this seemed to put us back in the groove once more. The bilge pump came on a couple of times which had Gerry rushing around trying to work out where the water was coming from, we think it's from the cockpit drains which gurgle and spit sea water up when we are bouncing around, Gerry suspects that the hoses from them might be perished and need changing out - it'll give him something to do once we arrive in Curacao! Late in the evening the waves and swell dropped a little making it a bit more of a comfortable ride, just not quite enough to be pleasant.
I keep forgetting to mention that we had a pet fish that took to hiding under our dinghy all the time it was in the water in the harbor at Prickly bay, we never found out what sort of fish it was, I don't have a photo of it but it was very long, round and skinny, about 1.5 foot long and about the size of a small wrist around, had a long pointed snout , was mostly a silver grey colour but had splashes of blue/green on its fins and tail. It reminded us of a Garfish but we didn't think it was one -anyone got any clues what it might have been? It must have been quite upset when we finally hauled the dinghy out of the water and it lost its sheltered spot!
At the moment we are sailing under a beautiful full moon, it's so much better than being out at night in the pitch black. There is still a lot of cloud cover around at night so the sunset photos just aren't a happening thing for the moment but I'm sure we will get some eventually. There has been one irritation today, as we are sailing towards the sunset with sails out we are blanketing our solar panels for a good part of the day so we aren't generating enough power for the battery bank and we have had to run the generator just to make sure that we have enough power to keep up with the needs of the fridge/ freezer, nav lights and instruments and of course the auto pilot - without whom we would have to hand steer! For some unknown reason the generator always seems to need to go on when it's my turn to have a sleep - need to plan this one a bit better!
I know I'm a day late with this photo but just to show our patriotic side, we flew the boxing kangaroo on our boom for Australia day ( it's actually flying every day but thought this sunset photo of it flying would be a good reminder of where we are from)