Call it Day 5, but day 1 doesn't count - since Bluebottle left Port Maurelle, Tonga, late in the afternoon. It is the 4th night out, and I have put the kettle on (can you hear the whistling kettle, see the blue and purple and orange flames?) Some times a cup of tea will take AGES to make, and all that time you have to keep 2 mugs and the milk carton from falling over as the boat jumps and rolls her rails down. But tonight the motion is quiet, pleasurable ... soothing.

The frustration of finding out that the wind wants to go the exact same direction as you do leads to two possibilities - sailing DDW (Dead Down Wind) which, in a seaway, only works with a spinnaker(we had a spinnaker foul-up aloft today), although you can sail wing-and-wing if the water is flat, like on the Derwent River. The other is "tacking downwind" and I have mentioned this before. Passage-making involves sailing hundreds, day and night, so you want to set up the point of sailing (angle to the wind/sail trim) and then leave it - and then go about life on board almost as if you were pottering about in a house.

Whereas tacking upwind (into the wind) involves the wind passing from port to starboard/starboard to port across the BOW, tacking downwind means a gybe, where the wind goes across the STERN. You have to put the sails on the opposite sides. It took us an hour earlier tonight to gybe, and I'm not going to go into detail, just let me say this, the last time we gybed - at 1 am this morning - it took HALF an hour ... Howzat!? It involves playing around with - uncleating/cleating, winching - trimming four sails, TEN separate ropes! And swapping from wind-vane to autopilot and back again. Just something that you don't want to do too often, especially in the middle of the night, when you'd rather be sleeping.

At this moment: "The principality of the sky lightens now" (Dylan Thomas), though it is still dark, and the Bluebottle slowly threads her way between two islands, Totoya and Matuku, at 19 degrees 06.8'S, 179 degrees 56.0'W (Note: we are about to cross the date line, 180 degrees! Right now I am exactly half a world away from my writer son Bede, and his family, in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight!). A kind angel has bent the wind slightly, more into the south-east, and the boat obeys the wind-shift, tracking the intended course of 285 degrees true, although her speed has dropped to 3 knots.

Reading a fascinating Tom Wolfe novel "I am Charlotte Simmons". Young people, uni students and parents would enjoy - as would you if you like a book with social "bite" rather than violence. Nice sense of humour. His "A Man In Full" turned me on to Tom. He knows us through and through .

More soon ...