Today, for the first time in ages, the sky is overcast with dark clouds, and there's rain in the air. Even so, there are enough chinks in between for the sun to filter through, so it's still quite bright.

It's actually rather nice to have a change from the scorching direct sunshine which forces us to erect towel sunshades in the cabin, and flee from the fiercest of the heat in the middle of the day. But it's still warm and muggy enough to warrant not much more than a pair of shorts and maybe a T-shirt.

Last night saw us skirting yet another big electrical storm, but strangely this time, hardly any of it showed up on the radar. Just the odd lightning flash. We've actually taken a route slightly south of our planned one in order to miss the worst of the bad weather.

We're making good progress none the less, averaging nineteen to twenty knots across a sea with an oily smoothness to its surface. And although we're now mid-ocean, there's a lot of debris in the water. Alan Priddy has just reported a near miss with a forty foot tree trunk!

We expect to be at our next refuelling stop in Sabang, a small island just off the northern tip of Indonesia, by Tuesday morning. From here, it's around six hundred miles to Singapore, passing along the Strait of Malacca - one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and also one of the busiest piracy hotspots.

Clive Tully

Copyright Clive Tully ©2002
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