We are still seeing the occasional ship hove into view. In this case I saw it first in radar. We run the radar all the time to allow us to see squalls. The radar shows the rain falling under a squall and gives us a chance to reduce sail before we get hit, or even to avoid them altogether with a course change.

So as well as keeping a visual lookout, we check the radar as part of our routine. I noticed a solid return at about 12 miles that did not look like rain. A short time later I was able to see them on AIS and identify the lights on the horizon. Stolt Integrity is a tanker heading to Chile and was never closer than 8 nautical miles. No problems for us, other than setting our "consecutive ship free days" count back to zero. We really are seeing more ships on this leg than we did crossing the Atlantic!

We had a day of stronger winds yesterday and made the most of them. Overnight it eased until my watch when I shook out the reef in the genoa. We have had the current mostly with us but we still find pockets/eddies of counter current and we are in one now - costing us a little over half a knot. We had plenty of sun though, so even after making 100l of water, we had fully charged the batteries from the solar by sunset. We just need a day of calmer seas so we can run the washing machine now :)