Lat: 19 00.116′ S
Lon: 163 44.269′ W

After spending a night making sure we didn’t sail into squalls with lightning, we awoke to an incredibly beautiful day — clear skies, cool winds, and long, slow swells. Even with our grounding precautions, sailing a 50-ft metal mast into lightning isn’t on our list of things to do. Luckily we never got close enough to hear thunder and we didn’t have to change course to avoid the squalls. Even after motoring for three hours in the morning, we only managed 50 miles our second day out. The problem has been winds with a westerly component that are coming from where we’re trying to sail to. The best we’ve been able to do is sailing 15-20 degrees north of the rhumb line. Right now, we’re having trouble sailing closer than 45 degrees to the rhumb line. That gets a bit frustrating in terms of progress, but we’re slowly getting there and the days are gorgeous.

DSC_0675 Beautiful days with calm seas and cool breezes

DSC_0692 Sunny skies and the ocean is like a big lake

We can definitely tell we’re getting farther south. The nights are feeling chilly and we’re covering up to stay warm. The thermometer says it’s only in the low 70’s, so I imagine we’re going to be freezing when we start heading south to New Zealand.

The water here is about 3 miles deep and a very pretty shade of blue, but we haven’t seen much in the way of marine life on this passage aside from a couple of birds.

We spent much of yesterday reading about New Zealand and trying to decide whether to settle in one place for the season and explore by car or stay mobile and move the boat more frequently. Either way, it looks like we’re going to enjoy our stay.