Well, we had a spell of 38 knots in the morning, we had 2 reefs in already and the wind was on the quarter so it wasn’t bad and just a squall anyway but it’s Patrick’s biggest wind so far. The rest of the day was benign and we made reasonable progress.
Patrick made a pasta salad with onion, pepper, tuna and mayonnaise in it for lunch, he had scraped out the empty mayonnaise squeezer with a spoon but omitted to cut it in half to get the rest but I saved it from the recycling and we’ll get it next time. It was mostly cloudy but no rain to speak of.
An incident that I forgot to tell you about, potentially serious, occurred on the day before we sailed. I checked out which involved filling in a computer form, going to the harbour authorities with some papers, then taking papers from the Harbour authorities to Customs, then taking Customs papers to Immigration along with passports, then taking papers from Immigration to Customs  and then leaving. I did all this, successfully I’d thought and thought no more about it, I had put the papers etc. back in my brief case and put it in the pilot berth.
That evening, just after returning from tea a lady from immigration came over with our two passports. Evidently I had omitted to pick them up. I had not noticed that they were missing, and would not have checked the following morning either. We might have sailed without them. Luckily we didn’t but it was mostly luck, we had only been on the boat 10 minutes when the immigration lady arrived and it was her second try, she obviously didn’t feel comfortable leaving them on the boat.  I suspect that when immigration took them they didn’t return them to me and I didn’t notice. Because I am so absent minded that I make an effort to put things back in the brief case as soon as I have them I think that had they given them to me I would have put them in the case. In any event disaster was averted.
Patrick made up his lasagne and put it in the oven last. night, we only managed to eat about a third of it so it’ll be on the menu again today.
I was supposed to do the 2100 to midnight watch and went for a doze after dinner but didn’t wake up, Patrick didn’t wake me up and when I awoke, after 2300, the wind was up and we still had full sail up having had about12 knots at dinner time, it was up to about 18 so we ended up putting 2 reefs in main and genoa before Patrick retired. I then put up the Staysail as it was looking like it may be a breezy night but it’s so small it does little. Having furled the genoa away a bit I unfurled it again to 2 reefs and we spent the night like that, mostly making 6.5-7 knots.
A lovely morning again this morning, the forecast still has the patch of light wind in different areas with different met models so I’m still following the ECMWF one and hoping for the best.
We saw a Storm petrel and another bigger petrel yesterday, so far. We’ve not seen any cetaceans yet.
Slainte
Jock, Patrick and Yemaya.