It's been a good day today, despite it starting rather late. My workshop on 'Water and Reflections' went well, although it's always a topic that I never seem able to agree with myself over how best to work through it. I'm constantly changing and tweaking the exercise, and for the class today I was trying out a slightly different approach, which seemed to work okay, and the students seemed happy with it (and their results were very good); I still have reservations, though.

The Captain's announcement today was extremely good news. He told us that we'd made very good time over the last 24 hours, using every trick in the sailing book to get as much power out of the ship as is possible. He described how he'd been positioning the vessel such as to catch the wind much like a sail, and actually harness the wind-power as they would have done in days of yore. Now the winds have dropped and the swell greatly reduced, we're well on schedule - in fact, we're ahead of our schedule - to reach Madeira in time for the fireworks. ETA for Funchal is now 10pm tomorrow evening - well in time for the party! Now we've got time in hand, he said, he would continue to sail at full speed for a time to accrue as many plus-points as possible, so that he might actually be able to slow down slightly so as not to "rattle the ship to bits".

The sun is once again full-on, and the temperature is a pleasant 24-degrees. I've just come in from walking 2 miles around the Promenade Deck (14 laps), which is so much better than spending half an hour in the gym, which is, frankly, boring, in comparison.

I'm also in a very good mood today because the film being shown in the theatre tonight is none other than 'The Bourne Ultimatum', which is the film of the year in my book. I watched it on the flight from Gatwick to Antigua, but am definitely going to give it another viewing tonight - I was starting to get withdrawal symptoms from not having watched it for a while!