Sunday brings us the eagerly awaited ‘Weathergram’ from Metbob - a well known and respected forecaster who covers the Pacific area. It pretty much confirms what we already know - light winds until 5S and squalls from 2S to 8S. The forecasts from the GRIB files we download is at odds with reality so often, we wonder if there is any point in getting them. Will there really be trade winds at 5S? I’m not holding my breathe...

Take yesterday - we had rain for quite a lot of the day, cloud all day and winds mostly from the SW becoming NW for most of the evening and overnight. The GRIB suggested S with a touch of SE. It was correct on the speed though - ‘bugger all’ being the best description. We managed to sail all night, albeit with just the gennaker up for the first two watches, ghosting along at 2-3knots in 5-6knots of wind. On my watch we got hit by a large squall and spent most of it sailing along almost on our course at 6-7 knots. Then as soon as the rain and wind stopped, it returned to the very light winds which we have now - SW 5-6knots.

MetBob suggests aiming for 5S 95W which is slightly above our course for Pitcairn (so a point we’ll be south of anyway), but for now we are concentrating on getting further south, which in the SW winds means we’re actually going slightly away from our destination. However, given the wind speeds are so light, its difficult to actually make much progress and we may need to resort to motor and burn yet more precious fuel.