566 miles to the equator

I am struggling with the heat. It's fine on deck, the air is cool, there is still good breeze and so much cloud cover the sun doesn't have that searing feeling on your skin like it can do sometimes at these latitudes. The problem is down below. There is no ventilation at all, and it feels like the air in my small cabin is slowly turning solid.

Last night I overslept twice through my alarms and each time woke up feeling like I had been drugged. My body feels heavy, my brain feels slow and everything seems like an effort. I am sure it is the heat and lack of air. It was fine last night, the boat was set up well and sailing itself well. I had my radar alarm on and that is a piercing noise when it goes off so I've no question it would have woken me up, but my normal sleep alarms didn't even register. Tonight I will try sleeping on deck, under the conservatory to see if that is any better for me. I had decided not to yesterday as there is still a lot of water passing through the cockpit and I did not want to get the beanbag wet, but I think it might be a sacrifice worth making.

Still I am wondering what the doldrums will dish us up. At the moment the route through looks pretty simple with no major parking lots, but it is still two days away and things can change so rapidly. This is an area on the course where so much can be won or lost.

The breeze now is just starting to ease off a bit. Overnight my average wind speed dropped from 17 knots to 14 knots. There is a different motion with this drop in intensity. A sort of lolloping across the waves, sometimes we take off down one and the vibrant rumble and surge ahead as we surf it back, but with this slight drop in wind speed there is this bouncy kind of motion that creeps in, it's less dynamic and normally signifies a sail change or mode change. If the breeze keeps dropping then big Bertha ( my big spinnaker) will need to make an appearance. She is on the top of the pile, ready for action.

I keep glancing up at my GPS, doing the maths to work out how many miles to the equator. It's 566 from here but in time who knows, it depends if the doldrums will let us through.