AIRMAIL YOTREPS
IDENT: N6ABC
TIME: 2016/05/01 18:01
LATITUDE: 05-20.12S
LONGITUDE: 103-19.16W
COURSE: 262T
SPEED: 7.8
MARINE: YES
WIND_SPEED: 11
WIND_DIR: SSE
WAVE_HT: 0.3M
WAVE_PER: 6
SWELL_DIR: S
SWELL_HT: 2.8M
SWELL_PER: 8
CLOUDS: 35%
VISIBILITY: 20
BARO: 1012.9
AIR_TEMP: 31.1C
COMMENT: Beach House – En Route – Marquesas Islands – Day 5 – 156 nm
Yet another pedestrian day in what has turned out to be at least – a comfortable boat ride. What more can we ask?
The big issue yesterday was that the winds were doing things they just weren\’t supposed to be doing. The day started VERY slow with winds of 4-9 knots
for about 8 hours. This is VERY slow sailing. But the worst part was they were coming from essentially where we wanted to go! This was very strange indeed
and I suspect the ITCZ (inter tropical convergence zone) was at work to our north. Our course is 260 and the wind was from 220! We can\’t sail as close to the wind as a 747, so in essence we were planning on writing all our friends a post card – from Hawaii! (Yes, that is where we were headed).
Fortunately, Mother Nature saw fit to get back to a reasonable facsimile of herself and the winds are now back to SSE at 150 deg true. That\’s a 70 degree shift. It happened as a small squall passed at dark last night. Future predictions say it may go further aft in a few days which may get the spinnaker out of it\’s bag. That\’s a big maybe.
The evening was slow and a bit bumpy, but all in all just fine. This morning I\’ve been struggling with whether to fly our big reacher or stay with the smaller genoa. The reacher won and it was definitely the correct decision. If the wind holds, Miss Piggy will be more like herself re: distance – tomorrow. We shall see what the Wind Powers that be have to say on the matter then. Our normal passage average is about 180 nm/day, but so far, the wind just hasn\’t cooperated with me. Imagine that?
Nikki\’s finger is healing, we did a little minor surgery and lanced the infection. It\’s definitely getting better.
This is a long boat ride, up to another 15 days is possible, though we certainly hope not. The instruments tell us 13 days at this current speed. With 2110 miles to go, that will change before I put the period on this sentence…:-)
I heard from Dental School Classmate Bob Prijic last night via email. He\’s a HAM Radio operator and may try and contact us via HF radio over the next few days on the Pacific Sea Fairer\’s Net at 0300 UTC.
Feel free to write!
KIT,
Scott and Nikki