Day four at sea we always knew would be a motoring day. At precisely 500nm along the way the engine was fired up and after 98nm of that the wind filled in from the south and ..... off we went again. The low in the middle of the Atlantic is deepening and we and Emilia are still on course for La Coruna. Pinta, Halo and Endo 2 are keeping their options open and hope to turn left before La Coruna and head straight for Falmouth. But Noel from Emilia has a personal weather forecaster who is adamant that La Coruna is the place we must go until this very deep low has passed through. All day we watched as the barometer recorded a steady drop of two millibars every three hours from 1025. I look skywards and see strong wind clouds. We know we are in for a bit of a blow tomorrow.

Closing La Coruna
Today was a horrible day. The winds were stronger than appeared on the grib file and coming from the south east put us at 60 degrees to the wind and seas. It is not so much the strength of the wind but the building seas that knocked us about. Then the contents of our hanging locker all ended up in our heads. I returned everything to their rightful place only for it to happen all over again. I gave up and stuffed the whole lot in our large laundry bucket. Donald who is feeling much better today thank goodness has begun eating and drinking again. David and I were a little worried about him for a couple of days. He has had to resort to sleeping, or it would be more truthful to say resting, in the main cabin, the berth in the bow being just too uncomfortable. We drag our duvets about the boat like children clutching a comforter and comfort is what I surely need, for looking out over the Atlantic it is nasty. Poor visibility, low cloud cover, rainsqualls gusting to thirty knots for too long. We skipped lunch except for cup a soups (a wonderful invention) and Sue Fraser's homemade oatcakes, delicious. Supper was tinned cassoulet and tinned potatoes, cooked up by my skipper who proudly named himself 'chef of the last resort'! It was wet and warm, about all that could be said for it. Nobody had much of an appetite anyway.