Lat: 1 44.585′ S
Lon: 94 26.957′ W

2701 miles to go…

To begin, we have to give a word of warning. The sat phone wasn’t working yesterday and my computer died yesterday as well. Charging the sat phone seemed to help even though one of its battery indicators said it was fine. After a bit of effort, I was finally able to get the sat phone e-mail software installed on Tiffany’s computer. We just wanted to let you know that we are having some communication problems just in case we’re not able to post blogs until we get to the Marquesas.

The blog we posted earlier today was actually written Friday morning. Today, there were only 20 squid on deck, although I found 2 or 3 more on the anchor which could have come either day. Even though we’re a couple hundred miles from the Galapagos, we’re still seeing birds frequently of a couple different varieties. As usual, they like to fly close to the green starboard navigation light at night.

I tried my second noon sight today, and even though some thick clouds kept getting in the way, the latitude was off by less than a mile. That’s two good sights in a row, so I feel a little more confident that even if all four or so of our independent GPS systems were to fail, we’d still make it in.

Food has been great as usual. We’ve taken advantage of the recent provisioning to have things like salad every day before the lettuce goes bad. Yesterday we also had haystacks, a sort of taco salad with chili that is one of my favorites. This morning before dawn, as I was taking over for Lauren, she baked a papaya crisp for breakfast that is basically the same as apple crisp but with a fresh papaya that we picked up in Puerto Ayora instead of
apple. It was tasty.

The frig/freezer has been running a lot lately and our batteries got so low yesterday that we had to turn it off (we could have run an engine for an hour or two, but who wants to do that). It seems like we’ve either lost half of our battery capacity or the battery monitor is confused about how much we’ve been drawing from the batteries. We’re hoping it’s the latter, especially since the battery monitor has made some odd claims in the last week or two. The solar panels have been doing as well as they can, but in the afternoon, with the sun in the northern hemisphere and us on a port tack, they’re shaded by the mainsail and can’t deliver much power.

The wind generators haven’t generated much electricity since we left, especially with fairly light winds the last day or so. Our speed had slowed to between 3 and 4 knots, so we finally put up the spinnaker. We’ve had so much fun learning to raise and lower it, that we’re a little slow on the draw in terms of putting it up. This time, except for one minor hitch, we raised it without any problems. We even have both corners of the sail tied to sheets that run through blocks to winches so that we can adjust both corners. Hopefully, we’ll be able to leave it up for a while. While the boat was slowed and we were getting the spinnaker ready to hoist, we spotted a 3-foot Mahi Mahi checking out the boat. He cruised around the boat several times while we were getting things setup. Their colors are really amazing.

True to form, now that we have the spinnaker up, the wind has freshened enough that there are numerous small whitecaps and we’re consistently at 7-8 knots with bursts of speed over 9 knots. Hopefully the wind follows the pattern it has the last couple of days in blowing the hardest in the afternoon and then easing off the rest of the day. The spinnaker and mainsail together is way too much sail to have up in a blow and they spinnaker is not easy to drop.