After motoring most of yesterday and last night, today we finally got down to "the promised land". That would be in the area of 11 deg. 50'N latitude where we expected to pick up the trades. And sure enough, around 0630 UTC, we set the kite in a light northeasterly and were on our way to St. Lucia!

For ten days we have been working our way south, south, south. It feels sooooo good to finally be able to go west. After lunch today the wind started getting light -- from 11k down to around 7k. I made the call to take a short dig south. After about an hour I couldn't take going south anymore and called for a gybe back. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. Because when we gybed back west after only going about 6 miles south, we had 4k more breeze!!

Tomorrow we are expecting even better breeze -- around 15k. We are hoping that our decision to spend so much time working south of the fleet -- which has put us out in a very vulnerable corner -- will finally pay off and we can sail the trades all the way to St. Lucia. But the trades are not yet well established, so the jury is still out on that one.

Tim has been a workhouse trimming the kite. He will spend hours upon hours squeezing a few more tenths of a knot out of the sail plan. Doesn't sound like much till you reckon the cumulative effect -- awesome!

Most of the boats to the north of us (and that would be, like, the entire fleet!!) are motoring either south to pick up the trades or west to get to St. Lucia. Our position in class and the cruising division will improve on the boats headed south. But for the boats choosing to motor or sail west, we may still be down in the class.

But the thing to remember is that ARC assigns a penalty to each boat based on the number of hours they motor. So the more those boats motor west, the more our corrected time will improve on them. They may beat us to the finish, but when ARC factors in the motoring penalty, we still have a very good chance to improve our standing. Only time will tell. We have motored quite a bit as well.

We are only about 1/2 way through that 30 lb. tuna we caught a couple of days ago and continue to chomp down on that. It is quite yummy. I made a loaf of whole wheat bread today (for the first time in over a year), and that was well received and quite tasty. But we are hot, hot, hot. The trades help to cool us off. But down below the temperatures are in the high 80s. All of our supplies seem to be holding up well -- water, fuel, and food -- and that is a good thing since it now appears our 20-day passage may end up being a 23 or 24-day passage, with arrival on Dec. 13 or 14 -- God willing!!!