Intrepid Bear - Intrepid Bear - Jack The Bear visits Intrepid Bear

Today was party day! Thea is 7 years old and thrilled to be enjoying her birthday in the middle of the Atlantic - aren't many who can have that claim to fame, let alone at her age. Amazingly, during the night Jack The Bear (aided by Rocio and Gaspar) had visited the boat and left clues to where he'd hidden treasure on board. The kids all dressed up in pirate costumes and the treasure hunt commenced, culminating in a wonderful pile of presents which is now keeping the kids amused. Thea was able to choose the menu for the day so it was a full english for breakfast, tuna pasta for lunch and steak for dinner...yum! Getting a little late to enjoy the apple crumble so that will be saved for tomorrow. Milly was asking whether they could have that for breakfast. When we started this trip, she couldn't eat a thing - what a difference 2 weeks at sea makes.

The last couple of days have been full of ups and downs. On the down front, the wind died and we've had to do a little motoring interspersed with a whole array of sail selections to keep progressing. As updated in our previous log, there was a huge upside...the chance to stop and swim (inadvertently) with Minke whales. Later on the day, we appreciated the second benefit of slowing down...fish! After 4,000 miles of putting lures out we finally caught a fish - a good size tuna. It was sushi (need to get stuck into the 10kg bag of sushi rice we brought with us) and tuna steaks for dinner - 3 hours from catch to table, not bad. A further bite yesterday gave the kids fish and chips for dinner. Not sure what the fish was, but yummy nevertheless.

The flaky wind has put other pressures on the boat. While Sara was on watch she heard the sail flapping a little more than usual. Given the sail was flopping all over the place, we didn't think too much of it. Fast forward a few hours to 6am and I was enjoying some man to man time with Harry (he can be an early riser) when i heard a knocking on the coach roof. Looking forward the problem was pretty obvious...the boom had fallen off the mast. Despite being a relative novice at this sailing malarky, even I appreciated that this wasn't helpful! Fortunately the gods were with us. The bolt holding it all together had fallen into the winch handle bag underneath and all the associated washers and so on were still on deck. With the aid of a few winches, halyards and great team work we were able to manoeuvre it all back into place and get going again.

Other problems? well, our asymetric spinnaker (our favourite sail!) will need some tlc to repair (another) tear after the knot tying the sheet on came undone and the resultant flapping tore the corner. We''ve also had our lazy bag off for repairs a few times (like groundhog day...please not again tomorrow!) after the lazy jacks (the lines holding up the sail bag) caught in the end of the main batten pockets. All these problems usually come own to small things. We'll keep doing our checks (caught a few things pre-emptively) and hope we see no further problems as we approach St Lucia!

As the day started to draw to a close, we saw two ships approximately 6 miles away. A novelty for us but perhaps a reminder that we're starting to close in on land and our return to civilisation. While we are all tired, bruised (and in Sara's case, fractured), we've been enjoying our time at sea and I suspect seeing land, restaurants, people etc will be a bit of a shock to the system. The trip has thrown some very real challenges and highlights at us that we will never forget. The kids just can't wait for the pool!

Intrepid Bears