Sea Eagle - Sea Eagle - Thursday 29th 10am

Great sunrise this morning which makes a change from the past few days. The skies have cleared and not a squally cloud in sight. A little traffic around this morning. Mackie has been adjusting course to keep clear of an offshore fishing boat doing circles in our path and we have a 200m tanker heading to New York on our port side. The crew are getting more and more excited as the miles roll by. We're down to 453 as I type this blog. The navigation software on the Mac is continually trying to work out the number of hours to go which is averaging around 55. That puts us in Horta late Saturday night. It's looking increasingly unlikely we will make the ARC prize giving and gala dinner on Saturday which starts at 19:00 although the winds are due to build a little from the West which would put us in a great position to deploy the secret weapon - the Parasailor, and make up a little time. We've had to motor through the night as winds dropped to a couple of knots but are now motor sailing as the winds increase a little.

We're having to become more experimental with the cooking as the provisions start to deteriorate. We're out of fresh meat and the fresh vegetables are running low. We have plenty of tinned goods though ranging from tinned veg to soups, pasta sauces etc, a few potatoes and quite a lot of ham and cheese. Ali produced an outstanding meal out of nowhere last night. Using a couple of tins of chunky chicken soup, garlic, chilli flakes, cheese and some leftover pasta sheets, she whipped up an amazing spicy chicken lasagne. Gregg and John would have been sending her through to the finals if this was the invention test round on Masterchef!

We had an interesting watch last night spotting a flashing beacon in the distance. We thought is was the masthead light of another yacht flashing as the waves rolled by at first but as we came within 3 miles realised it was definitely some sort of warning or distress beacon. We couldn't work out if I was a series of 3 lights marking an object or just one flashing so decided to put a quick call into Falmouth Coast Guard to double check. They took our position and description and decided they would like to check it out and would come back to us. We spoke to them after an hour to say they had checked with relevant agencies and partners and could rule out anything of the distress type and pointed toward a possible oceanographic research buoy or station and advised us to keep clear. They thanked us for calling it in and wished us a good trip after taking some details in case they needed to get hold of us again.

We tried a little fishing yesterday and will continue today in the hope of catching something for dinner. A nice tuna or wahoo would be amazing. Ian doesn't really eat fish with bones(!) and after looking it up in the RYA Fishing Handbook we've had to give him the sad news that fish finger season is from Oct - Feb so he might be out of luck.

Ben