25 Days at sea:

The first few days were pretty windy, and we later heard of a lot of damage done to some boats in the ARC fleet on their first night at sea. Afterwards, the wind subsided, and in fact a lot of boats had to motor south in search of wind. Chris Tibbs, the ARC meteorologist, had indeed suggested during the final skippers' briefing that we may well wish to invest some diesel into motoring south, given the general weather situation during the days after the ARC departure. You can see from our track - see pictures below - that we had to go very far south and at one stage even head quite decisively towards Africa, to finally find our beloved trade winds. We heard of many boats putting in at the Cape Verde islands to refuel. We managed to do most of our trip under sail, motoring only a brief part of the trip when the winds subsided to 2-3 knots!
As the subtitle 25 days at sea suggests, our ARC was long (and we sailed at least 500M more than what one normally expects to in a standard ARC). A lot of it undertaken in relatively light winds. Our last full day at sea was spent in the company of S/Y Geronimo (sailed by a couple of intrepid Kiwis - by definition and their nature, all Kiwis are natural intrepids :-)))) and Estrella (a German boat), motoring (oh dishonour) towards Saint Lucia, waiting for the final North-Easterly F 3/4 to set in...

In between, hours merged into days, into weeks - the daily routine of looking after the boat and keeping everyone on board happy with food and entertainment. As an aside, we watched the last two seasons of Downton Abbey, a much-acclaimed U.K. television series, whilst we were still on the eastern side of the Atlantic!
The only issue of note and immense frustration was that after a good week, our Iridium phone decided to cut us from the Iridium network. Gone were our daily Grib files for the weather and gone any means of communicating with the outside world. This upset us pretty much, as we were now left to our own devices and had to scrounge weather information from any passer-by (not many of them in the Atlantic where there were days we didn't see a soul - not even a dolphin!!!).

At last: Arrival in Saint Lucia - Rodney Bay marina:

As they say in French, we were certainly not "angry" to reach Saint Lucia after 25 days. During the last 48-72 hours, we needed to rely on our sturdy Volvo-Penta engine to get us through a strange patch of very light south-easterly (!!!) winds. The reception given by the staff of Rodney Bay marina and the ARC staff "at the other end" was really kind. Sleep at last, as en route the most sleep we had had each night was about 5hrs (not bad as in the beginning we had much shorter sleeping hours - it took us a while to acclimatise to the ocean life, as it were).

Pictured here some of the moments from our ARC activities and crossing and first impression of St Lucia...
Our Belgian Beer moment, some anomalies in the indications of our Furuno seawater temperature! our first-ever 1000 Miles non-stop, our daily routines on board including sunrises, meals and sunsets, and the daily removal of uninvited guests (flying fish that go into rigor mortis very quickly)... Not to forget our first lesson in Saint Lucian life - take it easy (which in the tropical damp and heat is a VERY GOOD IDEA. "This is a real dog's life... We also attempted some filming to upload on You Tube - see the You Tube links page when we finally get to upload them as this will depend on finding "good" and sufficiently strong wifi...