At the moment we’re passing ‘Motu One’ about six miles to the south. It’s dark already and the night is full of stars but on the little motu there’s no light. The only thing that tells me that it’s there is our GPS. Uuuh, spooky ! Well, I’d better enjoy that feeling since it’s the last island of french Polynesia we’ll be ‘seeing’. There is no land for the next few hundered miles.
Our day has been wonderful ! Actually it started already last night: the wind increased to 15-20 knots and we were gliding along with 6-7 knots. Even though the first 12 hours were painfully slow we still did 136 miles during the fist 24 hours. That’s not bad at all ! In the morning I started fiddling with the windsteering again and after a few unsuccessful attempts I finally got it working. It’s not that it’s all bad – it’s just that this windsteering is a lot more sensitive than our old one and even the slightes misconfiguration will let the ship shoot to one side but now it’s been working perfectly for the hole day and our batteries recovered from the night with the electric autopilot.
So the skipper has been very happy today ! The weather is perfect as is the sea and the wind – I just hope it stays like that as long as possible.
The capitana on the other side is still green around the nose. That’s not surprising as she usually takes 2-3 days to find her sea legs. Even more so as we haven’t really been sailing lately. Also her (quite chronic) sinusitis kicked in and that doesn’t help at all !! But she’s tough and she’ll get through it. Right now she’s sound asleep after I gave her some Ibuprofene. The kids are happy, were listening to music all day and both just now read a page in Bruno’s ‘Grand atlas del mundo’.
LATITUDE: 15-55.58S, LONGITUDE: 154-33.11W, COURSE: 269T, SPEED: 5.2, WIND: E3-4, TO GO: 1127nm