This feels all to familiar...(day/night 12 at sea to dawn on 23/8)

Surprise, surprise with only 116 nautical miles to go to the Lizard, in the extremities of the 'Western Approaches', it's wet and foggy. The wind has dropped further and we are now under power making about 4.5 knots. Even for me, there is little attraction to sitting around in the damp fog waiting for wind when burning some deisel will should get us in to Falmouth within 36 hours.

We have made some progress on understanding the mysteries of the boat's charging system. The alternator is charging the domestic batteries but it appears that is refusing to increase their voltage beyond we 12.4 with no load and that the Fridge is consuming more power than the Alternator is delivering. Quite why will require further investigation.

We hope we have now found where the power is going and why the alternator is not charging the domestic batteries properly.... There are three domestic batteries connected in parallel and so act as one big battery la; two of them are identical and were probably installed fairly recently at the same time. The third is a different make and looks older. To test the possibility that it is draining power from the other two, we disconnected it and measured its voltage and compared it with that of the other two. We got 12.4 v 12.6. Agustin thought that was enough to drain power from the other two. We therefore left it disconnected and monitored the voltage on the other two. It went up to 13.1 within the hour - a reading we had not seen for several days. However, with declining sunlight the volt levels dropped during the day until at around 1900 the reading was 12.1. At that point we switched the engine on to charge the batteries. Initially the voltage read 12.7 but then dropped to 12.3! So the mystery remains!

Despite the wet foggy start to the day the afternoon has been bright with just enough breeze to keep us sailing (since 1330)...

We have also been visited twice by Dolphins today and I managed to get one passable photo of a couple...

Excitement is now mounting amongst the crew because, barring very unfortunate events, we should pass the Lizard tomorrow afternoon/evening and indeed make Falmouth a few hours later. The Lizard is THE landfall reference for all vessels entering The English Channel, but it has additional significance for the crew of the good ship Bonny. A vast fortune is at stake in the shape of our sweepstake predictions of the date and time we transit the line running North West/South East through the Lizard Lighthouse. The crew's secret predictions are in a sealed in an envelope in the chart table. He, whose prediction is nearest to our actual transit will win his fortune - well a bottle of something up to the value of £25 anyway! None of us know what the others have predicted. We will mark/record our crossing of the transit when we pass it and open the envelope once we have moored up and have our celebratory drinks!

I noticed another problem after dinner. On checking the exhaust (we were running the engine to chare the batteries).  I noticed there was no water coming out. Luckily, with two very mechanical minded crew (Agustin is an Airplane Engineer) we had an abundance of skills and experience to address the problem. First the water filter on the engine inlet was checked and cleaned and secondly the water pump impeller was checked. It turned out to be shredded! The guys replaced it with a spare and all is now well.

It's now nearly 0500 there are 60 miles to go to the Lizard and we are under power. The engine went on during the previous Watch due to lack of wind. I had hoped we would be able to sail the remainder of the way but even I can't really face going at 1 knot or less when we are so close to making Port and we have the option of the engine.