We Ran The Very, Very Dangerous Gauntlet ! ! ! Now We Are In Peterhead Scotland.

Ralph via SAT phone (transcribed)
Hi, this is Ralph. We are at a place called Peterhead. We ran the gauntlet early this morning. We stopped for church at a place called Wick. We now have gone down the road to Peterhead. It is kind of at the tip of the last real crossing before we get to London. We have 600 miles or so to get to London. All is well, but all is not well. On our T-top we taped a bunch of knives and wrapped them with more tape, basically holding the T-top pieces from sliding sideways and then we were holding it down with rope. Then we discovered that when we were bouncing over some waves that the bracket that holds our hydraulic pump for our jack plate broke in half, so we need to figure out how to get the jack plate bracket back up. The jack plate itself is fine. It is just that the hydraulic pump is no longer moving up and down.
I guess the Intruder itself, the boat we are in, has got some minor damage in one spot. It is going to be cheap to repair with the right materials. We could not get the right materials, so guess what? The repair broke again. I can’t imagine why. We were slamming the boat into 15 foot seas with 350 pounds of gasoline going into the air, probably 25 to 30 feet in the air, and slamming down hard. I can’t imagine why it did any damage on the boat! But, the boat as a whole is doing real fine, other than that one spot.
When it comes to companies that make things that are breaking our trip, I should not be mentioning their names. My mother taught me to always to be respectful to people and to never say anything bad about anybody. I try to live up to that, but I am no where as good as my mother about that. She is like perfect at it; I guess that is why she is mom!
Anyways, in whole things are going real well. The wind kicked back up today, the waves were kicking into our face with real, real choppy waves 4 to 6 foot at night. We are both exhausted because we had very little sleep last night because we ran the gauntlet this morning with super, super choppy 6 footers, maybe a couple of 7 footers, but not too much. Thank God we did not have the 15 to 20 footers we saw yesterday in that same area. But we had for the gauntlet itself pretty mild. They say that it is one of the worst places in the world for shipwrecks and boats going down. So, we made it through there OK and we have made it across a couple of gaps. It looks like we just have a matter of grunting out some long hours on this little haul to get into London where we can claim the title as the smallest power boat to cross the Atlantic.
You have a great day and God bless you.
We should be in London, probably Wednesday or Thursday. Bye Bye