D+7 The Red Mist

It's taken 36hrs to traverse The Canaries, from the north of Lanzarote to the south of Tenerife. This is where "The Beagle" stopped en-route to the Galapagos. Charles Darwin had been suffering from terrible sea sickness and planned to return to Britain, but the islands were under quarantine and so the ship continued to Cape Verde and South America, and Darwin went on the form his theories on evolution.

The sun has quite some power to it today and we have opened the skylights aboard. It is almost warm enough for proving bread, but cheese scones will suffice once more for today.

We made a carefully considered strategic routing decisions around the islands and gained several places. When we saw the other boats' positions via the iPads, I'm sorry to report that a red racing mist descended across the eyes of our cruising boat. We pushed the spinnaker hard and ran fast in the hope to beat our compatriots out the archipelago to the south. By dusk, the boat was struggling under the load and James was feeling uncomfortable. None of us really wanted to revert to plain sail and lose speed, but sense prevailed. We only have one spinnaker and if we blow it we may find ourselves going nowhere in later light airs under the genoa. The spinnaker was retrieved and the genoa poled out for downwind running, and things instantly became more settled. By morning, the winds had dropped again and we were desperate for daylight to launch the spinnaker once more when we discovered a new tear. This was quickly mended and we are now flying once more on course for 20N 30W - the
half way point.

We also had a failure of the float switch on the automatic bilge pump. James dug it out of the bilge to discover it had tried to catch fire! All is now well and the faulty unit has been replaced. Any over heating had been contained within the sealed unit and this was also below the bilge water line so it would not have endangered the boat.

We're now expecting steady winds and are working out out ETA. If we get a great run, we could make it for Boxing Day, whereas another poor patch will mean we'll arrive New Year's Eve. Keep your fingers crossed.

Still very little wildlife to report, although Dave spotted a large dark fin break the surface west of Fuerteventura yesterday. We had sailed past a small school of basking sharks. They are completely harmless, feeding on plankton using massive gill rakers like the baleen whales, and cruising the surface at around 2kts. Until a few years ago, nobody knew much about this shark - the second largest fish in the sea and a declining annual visitor to UK waters as far north as Scotland. They were seriously overfished in the 1960s for their oil and numbers crashed and have yet to recover. They breed off the UK and their courtship behaviour is easily disturbed by careless eco-tourists who try to get too close in small boats. Only very recently have scientists attached GPS trackers to these animals to discover their wintering grounds so it's a valuable sighting for December.
places yesterday.