Tuesday 26th June

At Sea
3 53.367 S
103 03.413 W (at Midnight)

Today had to be the most boring and tedious day so far. As I mentioned yesterday the night was a very long one, the wind dropped and kept veering all over the place, including a long spell of being directly aft. Sounds great I hear you say – why can’t you sail with the wind directly behind you; well we can but it was pushing us the wrong way, we couldn’t keep the jib full so it kept flapping and we ended up furling it away, that left us with the main; unfortunately without the jib to hold us steady and give us direction we roll all over the place and this causes the main to flop and bang. When one of you is trying to sleep it makes it very difficult as you constantly have to adjust direction to stop the main flopping, invariably you miss it a few times and the person trying to sleep gets woken up and comes out on deck wondering what’s going on; I’m not only referring to Gerry trying to sleep, it was just as bad when I tried to sleep. When dawn broke we were both tired and hoped that the day would be better. The cloud cover was 95% and the wind dropped to around 10 knots. Things didn’t improve all day, the sun didn’t manage to break through the clouds, the wind remained light and coming at us from every direction, the sea did calm down and the swell became almost non existent. We spent the entire day fighting to maintain some movement forward and trying to catch up with lost sleep. Gerry threw the fishing line in the water – I think he is secretly becoming addicted, not that it did us any good the fish just laughed at our fluro green lure. We didn’t see a single dolphin or whale and for the 3rd day in a row we didn’t see a single boat. At the end of the day we had made some progress and when we did the radio schedule we were heartened to hear that none of the other boats had fared any better (not that we wish them ill, but misery does love company!). We in fact did a little better than the rest as far as mileage and average speed went but it’s of little comfort when you are sleep deprived. As night fell we continued to struggle to maintain forward motion, the night sky blackened; the moon failed to shine through and the stars just didn’t come out to play – not our best day!