300 miles until we land in St Lucia! If our E,SE winds continue, we might even make it there by Friday morning. The sun is shining this morning but it didn't seem so bright yesterday afternoon when we started having autopilot and rudder issues. The autopilot would shut down saying it couldn't control the rudder. At about the same time, we started noticing huge fields of sargasso seaweed in the water. After taking an underwater picture of the rudder and seeing the sargasso hanging from it, we concluded the two events were related. Doing wide arcs with the steering wheel periodically cleared the weed and the autopilot functioned much better. Nevertheless, all of last night's watches required more diligence and no departures from the helm including my watch when winds increased from 20 to 32 knots and the autopilot stopped functioning again. Cy, just one member of this amazing crew, heard the commotion and got up to help me put in a reef. But this morning, the autopilot is working well, the sargasso is not as prevalent, and David wakes up to make an expresso latte.