Morning

At 0430 local it is already dawn. When the sun rises behind the dark clouds, it sends radiating rays out onto the grey sea, changing its color from stainless steel grey to platinum grey. Looking behind Carina, the sea is a milky turquoise. Storm clouds behind descend and change the color to smoke grey and then to a deep battleship grey. Cherubic cumulus clouds to the east are powderpuff grey with a frosting of blue. An albatross glides by, dipping and banking and rising again.

Switching on the fishfinder, it reads a hull temperature of 62 F - about twenty degrees cooler than Pohnpei. We're bundled up now, looking a bit like a cross between ski bums and those poor guys in the world's most dangerous fishery. The off-watch bunk is a cozy refuge; difficult to quit after the requisite three hour snooze.

We've run out of store bought bread and tortillas so we made our first bread of the voyage yesterday. One of our Kindles went spastic presumably from exposure to sea spray but Philip heroically saved it with liberal doses of contact cleaner.

Philip also climbed out on the side deck and bandaged up a leaking deck prim that of course was completely dry during our long wet Pohnpei stay. Getting the deck clean and dry was a trick as Carina flew down the 2 meter swells. We're hoping soapy water, fresh water and acetone washings sufficiently rid the deck of salt for enough time to allow the super strength duct tape to adhere.

This morning we are ~350 nm to the theoretical half way point...trying to reach there on this tack before we have to jibe and move away from the next weather system. Later this morning we will enter into day 18; our average daily mileage over 17 days was 112 nm. We're running away from the wind, at least for now, squeezing out as broad a broad reach as we can towards the statistical NW corner of the north Pacific high.

At 6/2/2017 and 18:42 UTC (GMT) our position was: 33°53.66'N / 168°40.43'E.
We were traveling 021T degrees true at 4.5 knots.



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