D+14 Celebrations

We had lots to celebrate today, so we made time to enjoy the bottle of presecco that Panerai had provided.

Last night, after nine hours of fettling, James fixed the water maker. The method was very akin to those brave soldiers who executed The Great Escape - with nothing but a nail file, remove a tapered brass screw thread fitting from the inside of a pump head. Dave was instrumental in his success as James had gotten to the point where he was going to attack the offending part with a power drill, which would have written off the pump too. Once the broken piece was removed, James recoupled the desalinator minus one of the less vital compenents which we can replace in Barbados. We have water.

We're now pelting along on a broad reach - we made a slight course adjustment to try to avoid the worst of a large slack area forecast for tomorrow night - and so are on our best point of sail. It's also much more comfortable for sleeping. We've also had to change our clocks once more, so boat time is now GMT-2.

We may have been short on water, but we still have plenty of ice-cream. Today was Cinema Sunday and the dog house was once more blacked out for a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can't watch a movie without ice-cream and so home-made chocolate ice-cream was served with tinned strawberries.

We are attempting fishing again as the batteries are over charging and we had to retrieve the water generator. We'd better improve our fishing technique, as last night the boat caught three fish all by itself. We awoke to three large flying fish festering on the decks. We chose not to eat them as we'd had fisherman's pie last night and they were already starting to smell.

In the sweepstake for arrival time, we all reckon Dec 26th. James says 3pm, Ollie 5pm, Dave 6pm and I say 8pm. We'll see....