October 21, 2007

Blue (Sky) Morning
The wind forecast has continued to be wrong for us, but not in a bad way. The northerly breezes have still failed to show, and the 10 to 12 knot strength called for was eclipsed by 20 knots from the east all day yesterday. When wind picks up over the ocean, it takes most of a day for the wave action to "mature" into a smooth rolling sea. While it builds, waves tend to be sharp and closely spaced. That's what we had all day, with the waves crossing our track at right angles. So, each wave popped the starboard float up, just as the port float dropped into the trough of the last wave. It produced a pretty quick side to side rocking motion that made it hard work to move around without bashing into everything. But the 20 knot beam reach meant we had all the power we could want. With the mainsail reefed right down and half the jib furled we averaged 6.5 knots for hours. The wind wasn't perfectly steady, so boat speed surged up to 8.5 knots at times, then would drop to under 6 for a few minutes. The end result was a pretty good days run. By sunset the wind was dropping, and fell all night until we just had steerageway this morning. Since dawn, it's picked back up to about 8 knots breeze, giving us almost 4 knots boat speed over a smooth, gently rolling sea. This morning we're near latitude 13 north, still about 15 miles west of the international dateline (which is 180 degrees longitude). We still see a possibility of the wind swinging to the northeast, so we're aimed east of Funafuti, to allow us to tack west toward it if the wind does shift.
Jim had to go to Labasa on business yesterday, so I ran the Rag of the Air radio net this morning. It's fun to do when the radio propagation leaves everyone with clear signals, and there are plenty of boats participating. We heard from Molly on Kaila, 240 miles from Hilo, Hawaii, and from Ozzie Oy, heading into Newcastle, Australia. A group of boats left Tonga for New Zealand, and several were gearing up to leave Port Vila, Vanuatu for Brisbane, Australia tomorrow. Ross on Sea Eagle 2 called from Whangerai NZ just to say hello to Karen and me. Now I need to be getting everything set for the rising wind and rain squalls we can see on the horizon. I'm listening to John Prine on the MP3 player, singing "It's a Big Ol' Goofy World". It is. Life is good. Ted