After a cracking couple of months racing and cruising in the Caribbean LUSH is on her final journey back to the Med. Alan our mighty engineer has returned home to his family as planned and he’s back in good time to help both his daughters out in their upcoming leaving and junior cert exams. Lucy who joined us in Indonesia as our superb hostess has always harboured an ambition to sail across the Pacific so luckily she secured a job on a 40metre sailing yacht (nearly twice as big as LUSH!) and she joined them in Galapagos last week. Paul and I got three new crew to join us for the final leg, two of whom had completed the World Rally on other oysters, Ian and Alvie. A cousin of mine, Richie, has also joined us. In fairness to Richie he kept sending emails requesting to join so we figured why not! Ask and you receive! He’s loving the trip thus far!

We dropped our lines in Nelsons Dockyard, Antigua on Sunday and are now 550nm (nautical miles) into our North Atlantic crossing with 1600nm left till we reach the Azores. The Azores lie in the mid Atlantic, 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, and has always been a great stopover for yachties on route from the Caribbean to the Med. Paul and I have both been to the Azores on previous transatlantic crossing and are certainly looking forward to our return.

It’s been an eventful couple of days since we left Antigua, especially as this really is the final battle on the fish front!! Paul’s not taking any chances this time round and threw his best lures on the line yesterday landing two stunning Mahi Mahi (Dorado) at the same time!!! Wow!! Pure magic! These have been our favourite fish on the circumnavigation so we weren’t long filleting them and cooking them up. We treated ourselves to some cevichie too! Delicious! Yesterday we had very little wind and with such a calm sea it could only mean one thing!!!!……. a swim mid ocean!! It’s been so rare on this trip to have flat calm seas, in fact the only other time we had conditions like that was between Panama and Galapagos. Unreal. It truly is an awesome feeling jumping into the big blue ocean! The sea temperature was perfect and the water the clearest I’ve ever seen it! Paradise!

Today the wind is up at 18knots and we’re sailing along at 10knots on a close reach. Happy days!!

That’s all for now folks! Lots of love from all aboard the good ship LUSH!

Remember One Life…. Live it!!!

Audrey

(PS please do sign up for our emails if you want all the extra gos once we finish this trip)

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