… I’ve kept a diary of events for most days. If you have some time on your hands and fancy a trawl through these rather rambly jottings, please do. They are written in chronological order for ease. If you make it past St Helena, well, you deserve a medal for fortitude. You’ll find them by clicking here. Or look at the top of the opening page of this blog, under the Of Butterfly and Barnacle banner and you’ll find a page entitled Capetown to Forteleza Cruise. Click that and it’ll take you where you want to be.

I need to reorganise this blog a little better to keep long distance passage blog posts in a separate place but all together, if you see what I mean, but for now, this will have to do.  Within the next day – Sunday afternoon, or at the very latest, Monday, we will be continuing our voyage on to the Caribbean and St Lucia, so all will go quiet again for a little while.  I toyed with the idea of opening a sailmail-connected blog purely for these long-distance cruises, so I could update as we sail along, but decided a break from blogging was no bad thing – for me or for you. Once we’re in the Caribbean, we expect to stay there a little while until the hurricane season forces us to move south, so with a little luck and a decent internet arrangement, these twitterings, such as they are, will continue then as they used to, on a more daily basis.  Photographs I’ve taken a-plenty, but there’s been no right time to process most of them yet – and so those I’ll upload when and as I get the opportunity. But nothing can completely capture the full glorious experience of sailing for days and nights and weeks at a time. It’s been, as the saying goes -  a blast.

Many thanks again – your emails and comments are always much appreciated,  and you’ve welcomed us back so generously, that although we’ve discovered how much we love life at sea, it’s still good to be back near land and a good broadband facility.

Now to do some serious googling and find out how to get that bloody AIS working properly … and (as Vonnegut would have it) –   so it goes …