Coming down to the wire...

Our last sunset at sea.

With our destination in sight in ever-smaller-scale sections of the electronic chart plotter (everyone takes great glee in being the one to first zoom in a level and find both the island and our position still visible... what can we say, you find your amusement where you can out here), talk onboard has turned to our arrival. The list-making has started again, we're digging around the boat for things like the fenders (deflated for storage these past few weeks) and, with the seas calmed down a bit and the washer usable again, starting in on the mounds of laundry that have accumulated.

Sean has been charting our progress on an actual, physical chart of the Atlantic as we go (in addition to the electronic chart plotting), and tallying our daily mileage. Our record, thanks to the conditions (it wasn't even a spinnaker day) was on the 6th-7th, with 235 nautical miles, just a few miles short of an average speed of 10 knots. We are, in the local boat vernacular, chuffed about it.

Flora/Fauna/Etc.:

• finally saw some ships, two tankers (even spoke to one on the radio to check that our AIS [automatic identification system] info was being broadcast and received properly
• 3 flying penguins (Anne promises to find a reference to look up what they really are when she gets home)
• two sea turtles
• mysteriously, not a single flying fish corpse on deck this morning
• one really spectacular sunrise
• 209 miles to go!

The prettiest sunrise Anne ever saw.

9 Dec 2009 16:41 UTC 13 28.739 N 57 24.953 W

- Anne, for WT