Logged at 1200 on Friday 28 November 2004

A day of mixed emotions aboard Makathea and an unexpected visitor – another beautiful sunny day with our autopilot putting in most of the work freeing us up for a bit more tanning and some serious game fishing – we’ve been talking the talk in Las Palmas about the fish we’d be catching (not really based on any sea fishing experience I might add) and we’ve even managed to get ourselves into a few wagers, however, after yesterday it’s not looking so good, we managed to lose three of our four lures and failed to haul in one of our seven bites. It’s not all down to incompetence on our part though, every time we seemed to get a fish on the hook the wind would pick up and we’d start cooking along at 7 knots and it was a real struggle to get them in at this speed. Ok, ok, enough excuses, we’re rubbish at fishing.

More radio excitement yesterday as we got a call from our close friends/arch enemies on “Sea Biscuit” closing in our on our position – was nice to hear from them and good to hear that their engine troubles had all been sorted (even if they did catch a tuna yesterday and gloated about it), we tried to call them this morning but we now seem to be out of radio contact.

We also had a bird land on the boat late last night, somehow he managed to get himself into the back cabin, landed on Rob’s arm and then proceeded to do his business on his bed much to all of our amusement – our stowaway has since left us.

Progress over the last 24hrs has not been so good, we’ve been experiencing the lightest winds of the crossing so far, we gull-winged through the night and put the spinnaker back up this morning but it looks like our 24hr run will be the worst thus far.

Finally we have a birthday on board, Aymsley turned 26 today and we’ve just polished off a champagne breakfast and are now planning a few more beers and even a DVD viewing if “Candice” can cope.