Sunday 3rd June

At sea

5 58.960 N
80 14.976 W (at Midnight)

I’m afraid I disturbed Gerry’s "off watch" period at 01.00hrs as the wind had dropped to below 7 knots and had changed direction to almost on the nose, the boat speed was down to 3 knots and I decided that it was time to put the motor back on. Of course as soon as it started up the noise woke Gerry and he was up like a shot to find out what was happening. Having given him a report on the state of the nation I pulled in the jib and he returned to bed. By the time he was back on watch the wind was picking up again and he immediately put the sails to full use and turned the motor off. This seems to be a regular pattern - I get the light winds and have to motor and he gets the better winds and sails – even if we are slightly off course! Neither of us had a good night as we were constantly disturbed by the motor going on then off. During the night we saw a light on the distant horizon, it cast a huge glow and we couldn’t work out what it was, to make matters worse we couldn’t pick anything up on the radar. Finally when Gerry was asleep and I was on watch we got close enough to pick up the blip on the radar screen – it was a stationary object in the middle of nowhere. The glow became a glare of lights, I got out the binoculars and saw a sort of platform of lights, we had heard that there was a NOAA weather Buoy somewhere around 5 degrees and we were pretty close to that mark, we could only assume that was what we could see, but it was huge – much larger than I would have expected. As the day dawned it was overcast, there were no signs of life on the water what so ever. Gerry managed to just hear Y Not this morning on the call schedule, we appear to be traveling along the same route they took 2 days ago. We did all the usual dancing around, motoring, then motor sailing then sailing and back again. Cooked breakfast, had showers, fiddled with sails, put the fishing line in the water – just for fun as we weren’t moving fast enough to troll really. During the afternoon we saw 2 large ships, they went past us and disappeared into the horizon. That was the excitement for the day! We didn’t catch any fish and I ended up having to cook the pork fillet that I had got out of the freezer "just in case" in the oven as the wind came up late in the afternoon and we were heeled over too far to cook on the bar b que. We began our night watches and managed to sail for most of the night. It did rain at one point and the swell flattened out which made it a little more comfortable but of course that didn’t last anywhere near long enough.