Saturday, April 2, 2011

Day Eleven

Having passed the halfway mark yesterday (we celebrated with recently-discovered cans of soda water that had been horded by some unknown person - we even had ice cubes and splashes of cranberry juice - do we know how to party or what?) and I marvel at how well the passage is going. Not as fast as I had hoped but everything is working and nothing expensive has broken - yet.

We had been on a course that was more or less paralleling the ITCZ, waiting to find a spot where it's the narrowest. After much discussion with Those Who Know, we made a left hand turn to a course that should have us crossing the equator at 131 degrees west. We'll see. For the first time on this passage, we had to run the engine last night as our speed had dropped to below 4 knots. It wasn't too bad and I did get a solid 4 hours of continuous sleep which I believe is a first for this trip.

Once on our new course, we went through four different sail changes trying to find which one suited the wind angle the best. I was completely drenched with sweat by the time we were done but now we're making good time and the boat's motion is comfortable.

If we can average 120 miles per day (and that's considered the minimum acceptable level of performance - it was also how we described quota to our sales staff when we had sales staff), then we have ten more days at sea. It will be fun to be someplace new but I'm enjoying this passage to no end.
-----
At 4/2/2011 9:08 PM (utc) Rutea's position was 06°50.64'N 127°17.59'W

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com

No comments:

Post a Comment