Just in case someone finds a 2m high, yellow man-overbord-buoy with a strobe light flasing on top floating around position 20S, 162E. It’s ours ! A wave tore it from the mounting yesterday in the night.
As for the rest: all is fine. Not much happening as you might expect here in the middle of nowhere. Well – that’s not exactly right: Just a few hours ago during my nightwatch, the cruise ship ‘Paciic Dawn’ was passing by at our port side. I was siting in the cockpit and watched the ship pass while wondering whether one of the guests would look to our side and see those poor little sailors that get shaken and stirred while most on that huge ship wouldn’t take notice of the waves anyway and probably hang out at the casino with a martini in their hand….. I had a little chat with one of the officers on VHF and found out that they were also in Port Vila when we were there and now they’re bound for Brisbane just like us. Except that they probably will be there two days ahead.
Our journey has been quite fast so far, we did 150nm during the last 24 hours and passed all shoals and reefs unharmed. Now it’s open ocean between us and our destination. The wind so far is quite steady and instead of turning to the south as predicted, now it seems it’ll turn more easterly and increase a lot on monday. We’ll see… Maybe we’re already in Brisbane then.
Latitude: 21-51.45S, Longitude: 160-05.02E, Speed: 5.2, Course: 223T, WIND: SE4, DISTANCE TO DEST.: 499nm