On 5 December, Kiko writes:

According to Herb, the Canadian weather-forecaster who has a regular night-time slot on the SSB, there’s an enormous area of cloud over this part of the North Atlantic, and we can certainly confirm this as we haven’t seen the sun for two days now. Nevertheless, the wind has remained steadily on our port quarter all day and we’ve made good progress directly down the rhumb line to St Lucia.

One of the boats about 25 miles away reported seeing whales today, although we haven’t been so fortunate. We did see a school of dolphins briefly about three days out, but otherwise have not had sight of cetaceans. One or two unidentified sea-birds have been to check us out and for the last three days we have seen tropic birds: beautiful pure white birds with a long filiform tail. I guess it’s likely we’ll see our first booby in a day or two.

Yesterday we transferred 125 litres of fuel from the plastic jerry cans in the lazarette, so we have full tanks which gives us at least five full days of motoring should that prove necessary. I sincerely hope not.