At our last hourly check point 0200 UTC (8:00 p.m. ship’s time) we’d sailed 1,957 nautical miles. At our current pace sometime in the middle of the night tonight we will pass 2,000 miles sailed on this trip.

Two thirds of the way, that’s a nice benchmark. We’ve been putting up daily distances of 180-200 miles so we’re very happy with our progress.

Low Speed Chase

A while back we mentioned that there were a small handful of boats that all left within a week or so of each other from the Galapagos. In order relative to us they are Anthem ( almost 4 days), Elysium (1+ Day), Déese (1+ Day), North Star (two hours) and leaving a few days after us, Cetacea.

We’ve been chasing each other over this open stretch of open in this long term 3,000 mile race at a median speed just below 10 miles per hour.

We passed North Star early on as they only had a 13 mile head start, even though they are closest to matching us in speed we seem to have a small edge. We never saw more than their AIS signal on our plotter.

Déese we passed in the night two days ago without ever seeing, they were 50-60 miles South of us.

Last night we saw the first boat we’ve seen since the might we left when we saw the lights Elysium some 8 miles or so to the North as we caught up to them. We had a lovely chat over short range VHF radio and we were both thrilled to actually be seeing another boat near by. It is reassuring to know there are others within few hundred miles, we all provide a nice safety net for each other.

Autopilot Update

There really isn’t much to update. I’m beginning to think the problem with the Furuno brain/Whitlock drive is the fault of the Furuno processor. It seems to have decided the drive is broken and now reports an error without seeming to actually check with the drive. I suspect it hasstored the error in it’s non-volatile memory so now every time we turn it on it thinks the error is there. I suspect, but have not confirmed, that at this point even if I plugged the LA100 drive in I’d get the Over loaded error. We know the Whitlock drive is working well, we tested it again today making giant S shaped wakes with the Autohelm pilot.

There are steps we can take, maybe, to clear this but it seems that wiping the memory of the autopilot and re-calibrating the unit from scratch. Some of this is problematic, in that the Dockside Setup items sort of expect you to be not moving with the rudder loose. Somewhat problematic when you are 1,000+ miles from the nearest dock.

So the double watch and hand steering continue.