What day is it? It is amazing how easy it is to lose track of what day it is after a few days at sea, but counting the number of noon reports written and adding them to our departure date, or looking at a laptop, or the SSB, or the Chartplotter, these things can be used to determine today’s date. Fortunately, we have these electronics or might we be lacking one of the three crucial elements of determining sanity, that is knowing what day it is. We know each others names-good, yet we can’t remember the third test? Regardless, at least we are one day closer to Fanning Island.
Weather: last nights weather was good, and it was especially nice in that it was one of the first nights during which we did not have to make a single adjustment to the autopilot course or adjust the sails due to a change in wind direction or velocity. Yet, the waves continue to be a little rough for fishing. Catching a fish might be easy, but taking down the sails is necessary to slow down enough to reel in the fish and then with no boat movement the boat sits beam to the waves and rolls so much that is hard to get a fish on board without falling down, or at least it makes something that should be fun not so fun. Maybe tomorrow if we breakout of the south side of the ITCZ area the seas will subside and we can fish. And speaking of the ITCZ, we have entered the rainy area for we have gone from rainstorm to rainstorm this morning, but no lightening and the winds have not exceeded 20 knots. Wade’s experience is that it is worse at night here, so that is why we hope to be through this rainy area by dark. A satellite image that becomes available for download at 2:30 pm may shed additional light on what we should expect for local storms tonight, hopefully, none.
Our position this noon on Saturday, July 9 (We just checked the computer to determine this by the way) is 10 degrees 17’N and 157 degrees 32’W. The winds are presently 12 knots out of the east and we are also running our engine so as to increase our speed just a little bit to get us through this area more quickly. We have traveled 660 miles out the 1049 miles from Honolulu to Fanning Island and we have made 139 miles good towards our destination over the last 24 hours.
Lastly, we wanted to let everyone know that everything continues to function well and safely onboard.
Sara and Wade
