[password] rachel25
[position] 20 45.442n 026 39.007w
[status] On passage, Cabo Verde towards Europe.

We are settling into the ocean routine again. Watch follows watch. Day follows day. Our activities ordered by the sun and it's passage across our 6 mile circle of ocean. The wind has been steady. True trade winds blowing consistently between 15 and 18 knots and varying but a few degrees as the cumulus clouds pass over us. As ever we are rigged conservatively. It is hard for us to remove the first reef from the main and we vary the headsail area to keep the boat ploughing along, steadily, consistently, between 5 and 6 knots. Every afternoon an hour or so before sunset I take a trip around the deck. It is wet and I need lifeline and waterproofs but I like to take a good look at the rig before the sun goes down. Today I found a loose shackle, the pin half undone. It had been seized with a plastic tie-wrap which had broken. I replaced it with monel seizing wire.

Ana has started reading, a good sign that her early passage sea sickness is finished. She has started The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I finished it last week, some 700 pages describing 3 days in the life of a soviet "special" prison in 1949. This was a prison where well educated and skilled engineers and scientists were incarcerated for 10 or 20 years, while they worked on projects to aid Stalin's communist regime. Some became happy there, it became their life and they realised they were lucky not to be in a siberian labour camp. Happiness is very relative. But what a cruel machine communism was after the war. This was the reason Ana's father fled Slovenia to Australia in 1949, taking with him only a suitcase and a bride, to escape the bullets of President Tito and communist Yugoslavia. We are very lucky to have lived our lives and bring up our children in a stable war-free country.

Meanwhile Ithaka is taking us towards that country, imperceptibly we are crawling across the globe towards the UK.

[speed] 5.0 knots
[heading] 330 degrees true
[weather] Wind NNE 17kts. 1.0m waves. Sky 20% cloud. Baro 1011
[END]