DAY 14: Friday April 22, 2011
Position: 20 degrees 50 minutes North, 130 degrees 12 minutes West
About 1400 miles to go…
It's been a pretty tiring bunch of days. The weather cooperated and we had a lovely Passover seder, followed by a few sleepless nights. At first we were super excited to have hit the NE tradewinds, only to find that they would die in the early hours each night, making it really difficult to keep a course while sailing. The flogging sails aren't good for letting anyone sleeping, and it is bad for the sails and morale when neither of our automatic steering systems will work! To top it off, it's been COLD and overcast for three full days and nights. We've ended up motoring bits when the wind dies, that also allows us to charge up the batteries and make some water with our NEW watermaker! This morning the sun finally broke through and we had a beautiful rainbow, leading us to Hawaii…
Two days ago we caught our first fish! Lori's lucky lure came through and she had a hit before she could even let the line out all the way… we were so surprised we didn't know what was happening at first. It was a beautiful little yellowfin tuna. Just enough for three massive tuna steaks for dinner and a bunch of yummy sashimi to eat raw right away! Today we're fishing for mahi, no bites yet though. We've been eating pretty well past few days, starting with the morale boosting brownies, then fresh fish, and
Lori made yummy pizza yesterday! We're planning our next feast for Easter Sunday already.
On the boat equipment front, we've been able to find a work around for our AIS ship tracking equipment, and were able to track the one ship we've seen in the last ten days the other night. They didn't answer our calls on the VHF and passed within 3 miles of us, so it was relief to be able to get their bearing and closest point of approach from the AIS. The windvane continues to make more noise than we think it should, but it's been working ok. The latest job for Tim (Aka Mr Fixit, 'boga' man) was the head (toilet) which he has spent three days rebuilding, one part at a time, all the while making sure it was usable so we didn't have to go to plan B (the bucket). This on top of no sleep. Oh the joys of cruising. Fixing things in exotic locales!
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