I’m not going to say much about the crossing as David hopefully gave you a feeling for it each day as we crossed.

There wasn’t much to see, water, sky, sometimes cloud, stars, and always flying fish, even at night, flying fish.

We even had a squid on deck one night. Our watch system worked, David worked and I watched – kidding. We didn’t push the boat hard, we just kept sailing, as there was just the two of us and any sail changes really needed both of us. Having said that, we kept the average boat speed above five knots, the hughmungus reacher went up and thankfully came down easily, and we even held the cruising chute into the night one night. We had the odd squall and rain, but that gave us some practice using the radar, boy did it show up the squalls, it was great and the odd time we altered course to avoid the extra wind that would come with the rain. Mind you the rain was good, it washed the deck down. The amount of salt drying on deck becomes a real nuisance, you end up with sticky fingers, sticky clothes, sticky everything.

We used the watermaker to fill our tanks, which meant that there was plenty of water in other words we could have showers. Obviously we always kept enough bottled water just in case the water maker developed any problems or contaminated the water tank. Food worked well, there was plenty of fresh, even had some onions and hard cabbage left. Only one night did we have to resort to tinned meals, because of the weather, I guess that night we could have had rolly polly pudding, (I was also thinking upside down tart but some of my friends may take that to means something else) otherwise we ate good healthy meals. I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that. In the good old days when we sailed around the west coast of Scotland, in a boat without a fridge, and shops that seemed few and far between, we would stock up with lots of cans, this trip I stocked up but really used very few. Unlike our Scottish trips though, we did not use any cup-a-soups.

Did we fall out? The closest I came to falling out was when I didn’t do up the lee cloth and I slid of the bunk onto the cabin floor. In some ways once we were in the rhythm of continuous sailing,

you could go on for ever but I was also happy when the instruments showed ninety nine mile distance to go and the count down began, all sorts of things started happening, boat tidy, showers, yellow Q flag brought out, champagne put in the fridge, mobile phones started working we could talk to the outside world. Arriving early evening, we anchored off St. Annes, Martinique, the channel into Marin (port of entry) would wait until daylight, the champagne nicely chilled would not.

Link to gallery photos