Up until day 9, the weather has generally been quite pleasant.

And in fact in very recent days we haven’t had much wind at all, and the seas have been lovely and flat, we have been getting in the sea and also doing lots of cooking.

We managed to catch another fish, our first Mahi Mahi.

Somehow we have never caught the same fish twice on this entire adventure.

We roasted it with some veggies along side some fajita filling that we had made earlier.

However this morning the clouds started to appear and the rain started to fall, with the wind speed picking up again.

Before 9am we had our first 2 squalls of the passage, with further increased wind speeds.

At the time of writing this, we are actually in 20+knts of wind with a reef in the main (first time since setting off), and with the cockpit covers closed keeping the rain out, averaging 7.1knts SOG (speed over ground).

Also as writing this, we are crossing the 1,000 mile mark.

A bunch of us that are crossing at the same time are in communication daily, reporting our positions to each other and generally chatting about what’s been going on on each boat .

This now includes plotting all of our routes on a single map.

You can see clearly the 2 different groups that set off a few day apart. We are in group 1 which has headed further east initially, and the second group initially headed further north.

As we start to approach the final 10 days we start to have a better idea of what the weather will look like as we approach the Azores.

The weather routing by predict wind above shows us sailing beneath the Azores high in an area of lower winds for the coming days, before taking up to the Azores. And it look like this might be the route most of us follow.

With any luck (and according to the forecast) this rain should subside as the evening draws closer, and the winds should also stabilize. Otherwise sleeping tonight might be a bit of a challenge.

Until next time!