Today I came out of the fo’s’cle to the sight of dolphins a foot away from the bow jumping, leaping and swerving excitedly. We’re speeding along at around 8 knots and it feels great to be making good speed after the last slow few days. Except now apparently were going south east towards the Azores, instead of north east towards home to avoid some sort of horrible weather, I cant remember what exactly. This leads nicely onto my new reading material at the moment: The Perfect Storm. I’m nuts right? 

Newman and Tim said that I should just wait about three weeks, until the comfort of my own home on land to read it. It sounded like a good idea but I decided last night to start reading it anyway. The scene it depicts at the start really reminds me of what we saw in Sambro Harbour, the fisherman in the fishing town, so I’m finding it really engaging. I havn’t even got to them leaving to go to sea yet so I hope I’m not setting myself up to be terrified!
 
Today I strangely kept on remembering kids programs and songs and films I used to love. They were playing the lion king soundtrack last night on Danis ipod while cleaning the galley and it made me so happy! The only music I’ve really heard this past few days has been Erica’s inventive songs. One of her favourite past times is to take pop songs and change the lyrics to suit life on the Amistad. I was grateful to start with as it got the recurring b.i.n.g.o dog song out of my head but now I hear them about 10 times a day at least, I need a little bit of variation…so I try and keep songs in my head. Now I have had bizarrely the soundtrack to the film of Oliver Twist replaying on a loop. Just mentioning it to give a little insight to what looks like the start of my insanity…
 
Anyway, nautical science lessons are all going well. A couple of days ago we talked about tacking and gybing and in calm conditions tested it out. It was great having that hands on approach to learning about it. Also I started to use the sextant, which I’ve been looking forward to and now on watch, each hour C watch does a GPS and DR plot which is starting to make sense. So it’s all going well… Goodbye for now

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