Annie stayed in bed through the night to try and catch up on some sleep while I catnapped between watch checks. For some reason Annie cannot sleep despite her tiredness and was feeling very sorry for herself earlier this morning.

At 0930 we dropped the mainsail altogether and are running under just the genoa. This gives a better motion as the centre of effort in the sail is lower than the mainsail. For a while I was taking the wind direction from the new instruments and cable at face value. I couldn’t understand why the wind was showing from the west when ever more clearly it wasn’t. The answer is that the direction element of the new system has malfunctioned. The speed readout seems to be ok so rather than switch to the “temporary” transom mounted arrangement I’ll use the mast head wind speed for as long as it lasts.

Des informs us that the ridge of high pressure from the south Atlantic high pressure system is now below Cape Town and causing a compression zone of south east wind along the Namibia coast. We are on the western edge of the compression zone but as we head to the north west should extricate ourselves from the worst of the wind by tomorrow. This makes sense and we hope so because our own gribs have been correctly showing higher wind strength than Des.

Colin and Izzi on Endorphin Beta have nearly reached Fernando de Noronha on the Brazilian coast. It sounds like they have passed through or into the Doldrums having had light wind and a massive two hour thunder squall yesterday. Meanwhile Jon on Hecla of Uist has decided to spend the rest of the year in Cape Town along with Joint Venture, Windwalker and Il Songo, each of which have boat work to be undertaken.

Emilyluna is now out of radio range and we will keep in touch via emai.