First of December; it is supposedly the first day in a winter calendar month, but with 27 degrees inside the cabin and 23 degrees on the outside it is somewhat hard to believe. It is now half past ten in the evening and I am sitting at my favourite place; the navigation station with a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate in my hand. Peter saw a flying fish today, but it was resolutely heading in a different direction than us and we weren't colliding. Thank goodness! The other remarkable thing was to pass the "Endeavour sea mountain". The ocean suddenly is 163 meters deep instead of 4000 meters plus.

It has today felt that Queenie was on a downhill sleigh ride to the Cape Verde islands; a machine surfing down the waves in 7-8 knots, hitting 9 knots at times! It was marginally too much wind for the gennaker so we hoisted the staysail together with the poled out genoa. It took some time to set it up as we were quite rusty. It is not likely that the addition of the staysail give much of an improvement of the speed, but it will stabilize the boat, as it is sheeted in and the only sail preventing the rolling from side to side.

I started to read a book called "The Day the Whale Came" by Lynn Cox; a professional swimmer encountering a baby whale looking for her mum. It was a gift from my wife Imelda in May towards this sailing adventure. One of the areas that Imelda has a very good influence is encouraging a spiritual side of me. I am unfortunately wedded to "to do" lists and "rational thinking" all the time. I need to break out of that. If I wouldn't succeed with this on a twenty day Atlantic crossing, I will never succeed.