OK, here we are on Day 12 (Friday 2 December 2005) and we’ve had a few probs. As the rest of the fleet has also experienced the first has got to be the most frustrating, lack of wind.

The first week pretty difficult, ETA really was looking around mid-January. The effects of this was plenty of cussing at Thor and Neptune with little effect at getting them annoyed and thus throwing good sailing weather at us. We soon discovered that Neptune was a smoker and with a daily offering of a fag he shortly delivered, problem solved. We now give him a fag each morning, (the rest of the fleet may thank us in St. Lucia when we arrive by buying us lots of rum and coke).

Next, Batteries! Top tip to everyone. If you purchase new batteries on the day of departure (as we did) then make sure you charge then for a very long time. It took till day eight of charging them for four hours a day to get them up to a suitable charge that will last. Apart from that our power management has been pretty good. This has been aided by the fact that we no longer need to run the fridge as we have run out of foodstuff that requires chilling. We had to throw away two packs of mince and one leg of lamb. The contents of these were thrown overboard when we opened them, as we took a deep sniff and tried very hard not to chunder.

Fuel levels have been a keen topic of conversation with the very sophisticated measuring system of tapping the tank/seeing how empty it is by the amount of sloshing you can hear from within the tank.

Actual sailing kit has survived very well. The new Whomper (Parasail) is an absolute cracker. We have managed to explode two blocks (manufacturers will not be mentioned as I’m still waiting on a refund for something that I returned and I do not want to jeopardise my refund).

So to summarise, we are now onto tinned food, we have enough power now to run the fridge that we don’t need, fuel is a question mark and if we loose any more blocks we’ll have to start sailing with our bed linen as they will be the only size sails that we can control by hand.

I would like to mention though that these problems are all part of the joy that is sailing. Life at sea would be very boring if everything ran smoothly.