It has been a long night. The wind picked up and so did the rough waves, we had to close all vents, to not get water inside the boat, which resulted in a very hot saloon and an almost non existing night sleep for all of us. During my watch, close to 6 am, the sky lit up, it took me a while to understand that it was distant flashes of lightning. Then I had to awake my dozing crew, time to lay out the lightning conductors. We were lucky, the thundersquall never past right above us, but we came close enough to get the wind and the rain. It's easy to feel exposed when you're surrounded by nothing but waves and you have a mast of 12 meters, but on the other hand there's nothing to do about it. Therefore I didn't feel scared, it's all about handling the situation your in in the best possible way. The good thing about this night and morning is the fact that Monitor has steered continuously, even though there has been a lot of changes in the wind speed, we have had winds from 5 m/s to 23 m/s. We were sailing with a double-reefed mainsail and a small furled headsail and still did good speed. Now we have about 80 nm left to Porto Santo, the wind has died and we are running the engine again. I'm going to download a weather file to see how the forthcoming two days will be. We will probably have to slow down a bit not to reach the harbour in the middle of the night. / The Captain