Cleone - Leg 22 Day 4 - No Tuna*

Actually, it is the fridge that is still not full of tuna, but you can see where I am coming from.  And that's not all.  We have been grimly motoring for the last few hours because Bruce's forecast has been depressingly but predictably accurate.  To be fair, though, we kept kept sailing for long after it was clear that we were going not very far not very fast, even though it meant watching Viva - again - disappearing over the horizon.  At least this time she must have been motoring, and she did not just sail away from us!  The plus side to all of this was that we have had a wonderful and relaxing day.  A lazy lunch, with a beer for the Skipper punctuated a wonderful sunny day.  Once we had put the spinnaker up, the moderate breeze gave us some very good sailing in increasingly calm conditions.  This enabled us to keep up a decent average speed throughout the day.  The only consolation is that everyone else is, as it were, in the same boat (ie light to moderate head-winds), but the morning radio schedule indicates that Bruce is promising us two whole days of this!

Apart from trying unsuccessfully to catch Viva all day, we had a hard time from a yacht which turned out to be called Beatrice.  Luckily she is neither a World ARC boat nor a Cape to Bahia Race boat.  Of similar size to Cleone, and flying a spookily similar-coloured spinnaker (for the technical, one difference is that hers was a tri-radial as opposed to our radial head), the as yet un-named Beatrice sat to windward of us.  Immune to all radio calls, and in apparently sublime ignorance of the Coll Regs (International Rules for Prevention of Collisions at Sea) Beatrice gradually came closer and closer.  Two long fishing lines trailed from her stern, and the five crew studiously ignored us, not even bothering to wave.  Eventually we dropped astern of her and crossed her track. She dropped off down to leeward, and we were able to resume our course, with the spinnaker set shy as the wind crept forward of the beam.  But by midnight, as Shayne and Jenni came on watch, the wind finally gave up the ghost, and, according to the Skipper (who apparently knows about these things) we were officially becalmed.  We conceded to the inevitable and took down the spinnaker.  This was an excellent chance to practice a difficult manoeuvre under benign conditions, which will hopefully pay dividends when we next come to drop the kite, probably in more exacting circumstances.  Well, this is not a race (despite the slightly competitive atmosphere at the noon-time radio call), so with a stab of the button, the engine burst into life and off we went in hot pursuit of Viva (five knots, hot pursuit, what are you talking about? - Ed).

And we have been motoring ever since. Dawn has brought another lovely day.  Graham and the Skipper have sorted out all the problems of the world without even breaking into a sweat, Jenni has had a shower and Shayne has broken his own record for a continuous kip - the Spirit of Alex Anderson is with us still. Be sure, things could be a very great deal worse (and they probably would do if Barak and Wee Gordy were actually to take up any of our suggestions).