26th May

01 45.850 N

80 17.691 W



Weather; muggy, overcast and humid with rain showers, wind light and variable, waves 1 metre



As you can see if you are checking the map or the long and Lat we are making some progress, albeit slow. We are continuing along the coast line rather than heading towards the Galapagos as the wind is still pretty fickle, light and mostly on our nose, we are hopeful that by tonight we will be able to change tack and head towards the Galapagos but that's a few hours away so who knows. Nothing very much happened for the rest of the day yesterday, the sky clouded over and remained that way, dropping a couple of loads of rain in the afternoon. The engine kept us from wallowing around but even with the full main and stay sail up and the engine running we were still only managing to move along at 4-5 knots and sometimes less. We took turns in having snatched sleep and generally watched the water going slowly by, seeing a few dolphins late in the day but not much else. Then out of the blue we got a squall go through throwing the wind up to 23 knots and we began hurtling along at 7-
8 knots, Gerry felt out of control at this point and decided that we need to reef the main and struggled to get it down to the first reefing point, of course being a squall it didn't last too long and as the wind speed began to drop so did the boat speed and we were soon back down to under 4 knots and starting the mechanical wind up once again. The reef in the main got shaken out once again to try and push us further along. Dinner was a bit late as we hoped to see the sun for the first time at dusk, it didn't happen as there was too much cloud around. After dinner the night watches began and we settled into a pattern of sorts with all of the ships (5 of them) putting in an appearance on my watches, I think it's probably because I tend to stare out at the water whilst Gerry reads his book when he's on watch and probably misses the ships on the far horizon. Only one ship came close enough to set the AIS alarm off and even that passed us by with a mile to spare. We were entert
ained once again by a couple of birds who circled the boat and looked like they might land for the night but in the end they took off and left us in peace. This morning dawned to the promise of the first nice day since we left Panama. The sky has actually turned mostly blue and we can see the sun, the enclosure has been opened up to dry out everything that has gotten soaked over the past few days, I've managed to wash out our swimmers for the last few days and they are hung out in the sun to dry. The fishing pole is out in the hope of catching a fish and we are plodding along at just under 5 knots with relatively calm seas. In the 24 hours we managed a massive 115NM Ð slow but we are getting there, hopefully only another 26 days to go!