We continued under parasailor - and settled down for our lovely cream tea. It was fantastic. We all know that there is a debate about jam first or cream first - we're all 'jam first' people - does that make us Devonian or Cornish? We can never remember...

We think our 'butter melts' point was about right - and we were making some good westing. We opted to continue with the parasailor all night though the winds were very light. It turned out to be fine, though we gybed a couple of times to keep on our rough course.

Overnight we had our first 'flying fish' incident. I'd come off watch and Barry had taken over. He heard something clatter and thought he'd dropped his torch. He reached down to pick it up and was startled by something wet and slippery. He's exclamation brought me back to the cockpit to find out what was going on. 1 fish flapping around on the deck returned to the sea.

Light winds look to abound over the next week (todays seastate: slight, creamy - well it had to be really!). We've closed up a bit on French Kiss but we struggle in light winds due to being a tubby mostly-liveaboard cat. We've a few things we can try but we're after comfort rather than all-night sail changes, so we'll probably end up losing a bit of ground.

Having passed 30W, we're now working with ships time as UTC-2. We prefer to change clocks in the afternoon rather than penalise someone on night watch.

Its great fun being able to exchange e-mails with other boats whilst underway, especially as there was a great camaraderie built up before leaving. Its a shame that so few boats fit SSB these days, as the daily sched would work well - and can't be replicated on satellite phone.

For now, we look at the forecast and hope that we'll be back in the wind by Christmas Day - that would make for a very nice Christmas present indeed.

Finally - looks like later today, or tomorrow we cross our half-way point (in terms of distance remaining to sail against total route distance). Another cause for a mini-celebration...