Little Island - 480 hours

We’ve been without power for over 24 hours no, but it’s no big deal. The solar panel and wind charger are working, but slowly, so we hope to be able to start the engine by the time we arrive. It’s an emotional game checking the battery level, then waiting a few hours and checking again to see that it’s barely moved, or bizarrely sometimes even gone down!

We’ve taken to reading the cruising guide and Arc pack for arrival info and broad plans for where to head next. It’s been a pretty fun day and is making us both very excited. I can almost taste the rum and it’s warming sensation as it trickles down to my belly. Cat is most excited for the fresh fruit the way that fruit is meant to me - full sized and naturally ripened rather than harvested early and ripened with a blast of gas after crossing the ocean in a shipping container.

Given the power issues, anything in the fridge is now warm and must be eaten. It must be! I’m not one to waste food so for lunch took it upon myself to fit an entire pack of cheese into a single tortilla wrap, moistened up with a bit of hot sauce. The pack was already suspiciously pressurised, almost inflated, and the cheese fairly sweaty, but I took it for the team and got it down anyway. I’m yet to experience any side effects but would be naive to rule anything out at this stage. I can’t wait for a dinner of hummus, cream cheese, sweaty sliced cheese and chocolate milkshake - an original Martin Evans recipe. It will be my signature dish in my recipe book to be released off the back of this trip: Concoctions of a thawing fridge. Even worse, the beer is warm.

The wind vane has been steering us for over 30 hours without need to manually take over, which is quite pleasing given the amount of faff it’s brought us since we left the UK. It’s perfectly silent compared to the constant whirring and squeaking of it’s electric equivalent. It’s also meant that I’ve read more in the last 24 hours than I have in the whole rest of the trip combined. People have always said we’d have loads of time on our hands that would need to be filled with reading or other entertainment, but double handing the voyage hasn’t really allowed us much spare time.

About now many of our friends are arriving or have already arrived. I’m perhaps considering if wearing a full Musto HPX drysuit and popping a couple of hand flares is overkill for the arrival of our little boat somewhere near the back of the fleet?

Martin and Cat