Pleasant Sailing

The last two days have been nearly perfect sailing to windward, though with a minor frustrations. The air is dry, the sun is bright with puffy white clouds and the sea is a beautiful blue jean color. The two squall lines we've seen have both missed us. At night we have only a few passing clouds, the most dense of which seem to steal our wind rather than accelerate it. Yesterday we shook out a reef and actually ran a full genoa for at least some of the day. Our average speed is down but life aboard is much more pleasant.

GRIBs (wind predictions) kept promising us easterlies but these never filled in until about latitude 13 north. With them, we can now point NNE towards our first "waypoint" at 21 N and 162 E. We have just passed into latitude 14 and at our current pace, this point is still over four days away. We are also a few hours away from regaining easterly longitude lost while beating north. Given all that, we have been blessed after our first (self-imposed) bashing.

All is well aboard. We're heeled to port on a starboard tack and our bodies are in constant motion. We're sleeping well, though in 3 hour blocks, and have begun reading now that boarding seas are rare: Leslie - No Mercy by Redmond O'Hanlon and Philip - Hiroshima Nagasaki by Paul Ham. We're slowly making our way through emails received before departure but will eventually respond to everyone who took the time to write.

Sailmail has been a bit of a disappointment in this part of the Pacific - when we can get a station to answer, the connection is slow even when propagation is "perfect" per the tables. If it weren't for the beloved Shadowmail....;-) Winlink stations in similar locations have been better with KH6UL being a standout, though there seems to be a lot of competition for it.

At 5/20/2017 and 19:30 UTC (GMT) our position was: 14°02.19'N / 158°08.66'E.
We were traveling 026T degrees true at 4.6 knots.



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