We are still making good progress although the wind has dropped a little and we therefore only made 135 miles over the last 25 hours. The period is 25 hours because we have taken the opportunity to move the ship’s clock back by one hour, so that we are just an hour ahead of GMT.

Last night we had a very clear sky and once again we could see thousands of shimmering stars as we had a comfortable sail.Today the sky has been mainly overcast with a lot of light grey clouds. The temperature is a tiny bit warmer than yesterday but still quite cold for us. So Sulhan, for example, is walking around in a pair of long blue woollen socks, track-suit bottoms, two jackets and a hood. Almost as if he is going to play football on a winter’s day except that there is not football in sight.

We have 16 on board right now, that is if you include the chicken that Muhammad is looking after in the wooden canoe on the gallery. The chicken is likely to end up in a pot before we get to St. Helena, and the ship will return to having 15 on board. Which is just as well as the poor chicken is not looking too well after 3 days at sea!

Report received by telephone. Ship couldn't raise a signal for laptop.

Sea state Moderate - Weather Good - All well.

Report received by telephone. Ship couldn't raise a signal for laptop.

Sea state Moderate - Wind light and from astern - Weather cloudy and cold - All well.

Report received by telephone. Ship couldn't raise a signal for laptop.

Sea state Moderate - Wind getting lighter from astern - Weather cloudy and cold - All well.

The wind has lightened still further, is very variable and changes direction minute to minute, causing a few problems for the helmsmen. So we have only done 60 miles in the last 24 hours, with 861 miles to go to St. Helena. The weather is cloudy, it rains occasionally and there are a few sunny outbreaks. The sunny breaks provide some of the crew with an opportunity to take their first salt-water shower in over a week! And afterwards, with a good blast of deodorant, they smell a lot better too.

The last few days have been frustrating as each day we have made less and less progress as the winds have died down.  Reg’s weather forecasts predict it will be that way until early into next week when some 20 knot south easterly winds are predicted.

The other hugely frustrating thing has been trying to re-establish email communications with the satellite “skyfile” which we use to send reports to the website. We lost contact on 19^th January and Duncan, the Webmaster, has had to type up short verbal reports that were phoned via the satellite phone to his answering machine for the last few days. Hours and hours have been spent on board checking the vast number of possible configurations of different modems, comports, baud rates, satellite areas and so on in order to make a successful transmission. Literally hundreds of attempts at making transmissions have come to nothing. Finally France Telecom, who provide the skyfile service and software, altered some of the account settings at their end and at 0400 hours this morning we got a break through and a successful transmission. So if you are reading this, you will know that the connection is still working. The reason why it stopped working and how it works at all is something of a mystery! France Telecom can’t explain why we seem to be able to transmit on the Indian Ocean region satellite and not the stronger satellite signal for the Atlantic East. None of this fills one with great confidence about how long our system will hold up for but for now we can send our reports in. And in any event we should get to St Helena in about ……days.

Meanwhile the crew are shortly going to have a Saturday afternoon happy hour and can have a bit of a social, as we have been at sea for just over a week.

Ship lost email contact again - Report delivered to telephone answer machine via satellite phone, so no comments.

Winds now very light and unpredictable. Ship continuously changing course.  Air temperature now getting a little warmer and more comfortable.  

The crew will try the email connection again later. 

Ship lost email contact again - Report delivered to telephone answer machine via satellite phone, so no comments.

Winds still very light and unpredictable. Ship continuously changing course.  Air temperature still rising.  

Still no email contact - Report delivered to telephone answer machine via satellite phone, so no comments.

Winds slightly fresher and more reliable so ship's speed has increased to 4 knots.  

As predicted by Reg, we have enjoyed slightly stronger winds over the last 24 hours and as a result managed some 120 miles over the period. We now have just 528 miles to run to St.Helena and have done 1174 miles since leaving Cape Town.

We have had the drain pipes up on the communications side and a faulty wire seems to have been mainly responsible for our email difficulties, although one can never be totally sure! So apologies to all of you who are following this voyage and have found the reports to have been rather  brief of late. Unfortunately they have had to be phoned through to the website instead of the usual emails and satellite air time is expensive to say the least.

Still life on board has continued. The weather has been improving and getting a little warmer as we approach St. Helena. We have been blessed with two medium sized dorado being caught, bringing our total to date of 33 in all. The first fish made for an excellent lunch earlier today; fried dorado steaks with vegetable stew and fluffy lemon-flavoured rice. Undoubtedly our best meal for some time and unlikely to be matched for a while..

The wind has become a little stronger and is around 15- 20 knots. So we have managed to cover 139 miles in the last 24 hours. We now have less than 400 miles to run before we get to St. Helena.   

The extra wind has made the ship a bit more of lively place, with the ship acting like a young frisky colt jumping from side to side at the start of a race meeting. Waves from astern are about 3-4 meters high and we have been surfing along through the night as we literally cut through the waves ahead and roll from side to side as the wind is also broadly astern of us. We are sailing goose winged again to make the most of the wind. However we are being pushed a little bit too far to the south west of St Helena at the moment and will have to tack later today or tomorrow to enable us to approach from the east and enter St.Helena’s natural harbour under sail. 

During the night we passed through the Greenwich Meridian and our longitude is now 000.40.4 degrees west. We had a few moments to reflect on passing Big Ben and London many many miles to our north, as our GPS showed us passing through the Greenwich Meridian at 6 to 7 knots. A reminder of the fact that we have now done over 1200 miles since leaving Cape Town a week ago last Saturday. Pretty good progress for an 8^th century ship and all going well.

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