Almost two weeks in and that wave of emotion has had peaks and troughs along the way. Here’s some high level stuff to paint the picture. I like a bullet point.

• It’s about 4000 miles -ish to Nuku Hiva from Panama
• I say ish because you never travel in a straight line in a sail boat, there’s always some too-ing and fro-ing to be done
• It took us 9 days to get to the north western end of the Galápagos Islands. The first 36 hours was motoring with diddly squat wind
• We then had plenty of wind, almost exclusively from where we wanted to go. Plus counter currents. This necessitated an etch-a-sketch track as we tacked back and forth to make slow slow uncomfortable progress
• We had unpleasant, nay scary, thunderstorms with lightening forks cracking around the boat. The rain was a true deluge and our visibility was diminished massively. We were both hanging out, sat on the cabin floor in our soaked waterproofs at one point
• THEN we picked up a strong west going current and our speed over the ground topped 10.2 knots. Hurrah!
• Yesterday our noon to noon distance made good was 190 miles. Best ever by some margin. Will we hit the magical 200 mark today?
• Our top speed hit 10.2 knots at one point last night. Blimy O’Reilly
• We are fit and well and already talking about getting in and walking about. Lots of walking about
• Distance to go is 2,418 miles….in a straight line so not halfway yet
• Other boats seen since we left the shipping lanes around Panama. 1 cargo vessel.
• Fish caught. One enormous, humongous, swordfish. It snapped our line. There’s no way we’d have landed this thing onto Grace
• Lots of dead squid on the deck each morning. I like squid but I don’t fancy cooking these guys up
• Plenty of dolphins….small ones….birds too
• It’s been chilly at night. Unexpected. We dug out thermals for our night watches.
• And finally, still have 4 cabbages left.

So that’s a little summary of what’s been our focus for the last couple of weeks. At some point we need to cross the doldrums and the equator to get further south. But for the time being, we’re heading west with good wind and current, eating miles, drinking tea, staying sane. We hope!