Cloud Jumper - Mid Atlantic Update

Just a quick update from us all on Cloud Jumper on 1st December!! It is day 13 today and we have some mince pies onboard to celebrate the start of Christmas, it is the first time for some of us not to have a calendar to open!! We are now well and truly making our way across the Atlantic, yesterday we were at the same longitude as the East coat of Brazil South of us.
The Atlanic Ocean here is over 4km deep which is amazing and the sea is a very lovely colour, I can see why it is all "Blue water" sailing. The water is very warm and we all chuck buckets of water over ourselves once or twice day to try to keep cool, it's really refreshing after a 3hour watch in the blazing sunshine of the tropics.
We are starting to see the weather changing and will be entering the squall area soon, we have been trying to get the boats Radar set up to show the squalls as they approach, Jules was a whiz with the Radar and as he could not make this leg we have been looking for the instruction book (I think it is in the garage?) Julian has given us instructions now but we cannot really see if it works until we get our first squall! The idea is the Radar will see the squall coming to give us time to reef the sails of even try to sail around them.
Neil has been reading " The Sea Survival Handbook" that Kaz gave me for Christmas, he has been reading aloud the multitude of ways you can come to grief on a boat which has had us all a bit worried at times but at least Neil will know what to do if anything happens, one major point was don't shoot down the rescue helicopter with your emergency flares!!
We have started putting the clocks back at hour every few days, at one point the sun was rising at 8:30am its quiet fun Controlling your own time.
We think St Lucia is 4 hours behind the UK. Yesterday we passed within 100m of Sea Dweller (another sailing boat heading to St Lucia) we had a chat on the radio, they had caught a large Tuna and invited us onboard for some sushi but I declined as their boat was much fancier that our little thing and did not want to damage it. It was nice to chat to another boat, I think they are German.
The wind has really picked up in the last couple of days and the waves are getting pretty big too. We can surf down the big waves at about 11knots which is fun, last night we had 2 reefs in the main as it was pitch black and you could not see the waves coming.
We have been eating really well thanks to Jowan's skills in the galley. We had cheesy French toast for breakfast yesterday and the day before Mathais cooked Crepes for Breakfast. Neil has been busy firing up 'Karen' our water maker and it takes a couple of hours every couple of days to replenish the water for drinking, cooking, washing etc.
Life on board is usually pretty relaxed with Neil's speaker on a lot of the time and some great tunes to sing along to. Mathais plays the guitar at times too. Luckily it floats haha! There have been some amazing seabirds, I bought an Atlantic seabird book for the trip but left it in the garage which is really annoying!! There were 3 flying fish on the deck this morning, the smaller ones fly upto about 3m out of the water!
I will try to upload some pictures on the ARC blog later but at the moment the Satellite e mail is down. Well that is about it for now, thanks for all the support and our lovely families for letting us out to play for a few weeks. Take care and see you soon Pete, Neil, Jowan and Mathais xx