We are underway now for over a day and it was near as difficult leaving Fanning Island as it was leaving Hawaii. The kind people of Fanning kept wanting to get together one last time to say good bye, but finally we did leave on July 30th with a final gift of a stalk of about two hundred bananas that now hang in the cockpit of the boat. The bananas are still mostly green, but some will be ripe tomorrow and for those that don’t know bananas that well by the quantity of an entire stalk, well they are all likely to ripe within a 4 day period. So we are going to have to go bananas finding ways to eat all these bananas. We had a dehydrator given to us before leaving Hawaii (Thank you Bella and Paul) and we expect to make use of it drying bananas.
Our first day sailing towards our next island destination of Penrhyn involved winds that were much less than forecasted and also more southerly than predicted. A combination that had us concerned our next destination might instead be Samoa. Not that there is anything wrong with Samoa, but it is not really where we want to go next. At least the first day was very pleasant conditions at sea. Finally around dark on July 31st the winds switched to more out of the east and we are now on a better course for to reach our destination.
At noon on July 31st our position was 2 degrees 29.5′ North and 159 degrees 32′ West. We have only traveled 82 miles from Fanning over the last day and as we mentioned, not entirely in the right direction either. We have 688 more miles to go to reach Penrhyn. And tomorrow we should cross the equator some time in the evening, so we expect to do some celebrating of that milestone.
Wade and Sara
