Charm Offensive - Can almost smell the St Lucian Rum

After 13 days at sea we can almost smell the Rum of St Lucia, we are currently 400 miles out and assuming nothing goes wrong we should arrive in St Lucia in the next few days.

Since the last blog update we have caught a Wahu and another Dorado but only caught them when we had 5kts of wind and were travelling around 2-3kts and sadly it was not in the right direction due to the wind on the nose. With a bunch of pure sailors on board the decision not to motor was made so we sat it out while our main flopped back and forth in the Atlantic for a little over a day. I've been told no wind can make people go crazy well I can tell you that after 24 hours of the sails flapping and the distance to St Lucia no closer that was enough to send us all a little batty. I can't imagine what weeks in the doldrumns would be like.

Javier has contiued to cook up some amazing meals, we ate gourmet pizza yesterday and right now he is cooking a Paella or something similiar.

John's radio Skeds are getting longer each day, with the topic of conversation pretty much centered fishing and life aboard. The $120 HF SSB 8525 Codan Transciever may look like an antique amongst the modern
electronics on this boat but it does wonders. A bit of copper is towed behind the boat to earth it and the conversation flows over 100's of miles across the Atlantic.

Peter's pay back for the black eye accident occured the other day with another at sea incident. A cup of hot tea had just been made by Nick when a rogue wave hit us and the oil residue from Javiers cooking on
the floor caused Nick to slip and fly across the boat and land on Peter with hot tea going everywhere. Luckily no burns or injuries were sustained, there was just a nice mess for Nick to clean up.

Life aboard is still going well, a lot has been learnt about the Spanish economy, the education system and why it is so good to invest in Spain at the moment. More has been learnt about flying 747's and Peter's younger years. John has also taught us about his younger years and has learnt how to make an amazing banana bread using pears, I guess it should be called pear bread. Nick has continued to study for his telecommunications certifications and is addicted to the tv show Homeland season 1. Much to the crew's delight Nick's music has been
replaced with Elton John. The crew is hopping this will last to St Lucia........

Cheers,

Nick