St.Lucia here we come

Good morning.

We still have all the clocks on the boat on UTC but we are already in mid atlantic time zone. This means we get up at 8.30 but then the sun is just coming up. Instead of checking how many miles we have done since Las Palmas, we are now checking how many are left until Rodney Bay Marina in St. Lucia.
1149 miles still to go. Yesterday evening we had Penne with Salmon and Tomato salad but the salmon was of course not fished by us :-)
Then we shared a Bacardi Breezer as a celebration of the "half distance" and played 2 rounds of seven, our favorite card game also known as Skip-Bo.
Chris won all games! During the night watch i watched the movie Australia and enjoyed the stars and the full moon. It is unbelievable how bright it is during the night. Outside you do not need a torch at all.

This morning we finished the self made bread and now we run the engines for an hour to make hot water since it is SHOWER-DAY! YEAH!
Only 2 more showers until St. Lucia!
According to the time corrected times we are now on place 10 of 18 catamarans. We lost a lot 2 days ago when we decided to take the Parasailor down but safety and fun is more important than competition. We are still 1st of the three Lagoon 380 :-) and all other boats are bigger than ours. And there are still 1000 miles to go.
Pelican, a 53ft Bruce Roberts yacht is out of the race. They had problems with their rig. A rig is the Mast and everything attached to it. One of the steel cables failed and they also had engine problems. They wanted to reach the Cape Verde islands but yesterday evening the Skipper decided to call Mayday and abandon the yacht.
The 5 crew members were picked up by a merchant vessel at 0200 this morning and will be brought to Gibraltar. The boat is now drifting in the atlantic. I wish them a successful recovery later.

So already two boats have been given up during this years ARC but all sailors have been rescued.

The weather forecast for our sea area this morning looks like this:
*OSCAR & PAPA*
WIND: ENE/E 13-18 gust 25 lull 10.

SEAS: 1.5-3m, mixed from NW & NE

That means that we do not sail record time but also that we are not slow. The sea is a bit rough, especially since it is coming from different directions but we are used to that. We hope that the wind will not "lull" to 10 knots since then we would only do 5 knots of speed.
We currently target to be in St. Lucia around the 9th of December even though it is a bit early to estimate it.
This means our average speed should not drop below 6.5 knots!

Todays picture shows many aspects. Lani brushing her teeth since even out on sea one should not drop the basics of civilization :-). Also the temperature since it is to warm to wear a T-Shirt. You can sea Chris´ christmas deco on the window, adhesive rubber stars and christmas trees which Lani really enjoys.
Also outside the window you can see two of our additional Diesel canisters with 22 liters each. We have used around 30 Liters so far just to produce hot water and electricity and we still have around 270 left.

Above the window you see some pictures. We have glued pictures of all the people we like all around the boat. On these pictures you can see Celestine holding Lani as a baby in India and a snap of Nina and Alis while they were on our boat in La Gomera.
So we have our friends and families always around us!

That´s it for now

Michael