As of this writing there are about 155 miles left until the anchorage in Nuka Hiva. That is less than our slowest day, and we anticipate settling in the anchorage late in the day tomorrow. Everyone is tired and ready to be there. It wasn’t a bad day but the little things are adding up.
Our decision to motor a bit last night paid off well. We planned to motor all night, but after heading about 40 miles West the wind filled in. When the engine came on we had 10 knots from the East and falling which with the rolling waves guaranteed a night of slow sailing way to the South with lots of rolling and filling and crashing of the sails.
By 1:00 a.m ships time though the wind had filled with 15-18 knots from the Southeast which was perfect and allowed us to cut the engine and sail faster in the same direction than we’d been motoring. This breeze held the rest of the night and most of the morning allowing us to, for once, sail exactly where the weather route suggested with good speed.
By mid day though the wind started to fade. We discussed putting up the spinnaker but realized we only had a few more hours of daylight to carry it so we decided not to. The decision to tough it out was made.
In the mean time a really large fish stole my favorite and most effective lure, and the generator decided to stop producing AC power once again. The little things, as said, add up. Now I get to debug the generator again when we get to paradise instead of sleeping all day like the dead.
About Time III
This is one of the sillier things I’ve learned about the Marquesas the time zone is just bizarre. Weirder by far than American Daylight Savings time (which is viewed as a pretty silly thing by much of the rest of the world, we’ve learned).
Time zones are an hour, right? If a football game starts at 1:00 EST, it’s on at 12:00 Central, 11:00 Mountain, 10:00 Pacific time and so on. It makes the what time is it over there right now pretty easy because all you have to do is figure out how far to move the little hand in your mind in nice easy hours.
Local times are generally expressed relative to UTC, for example EST is UTC Minus 5except during spring ahead. Or is it fall behind?
Time in the Marquesas is in fact UTC Minus 9.5 hours.
Yupit shifts half an hour instead of a whole hour.
Good like trying to convince your PC to set to THAT time zone, from what I can see it doesn’t exist in Windows. I’m guessing most of my other clocks will also be incapable of grasping this as well.
So let us figure this out. When can we call Mom and Dad without waking them up? They are at UTC 5 and we are at UTC 9.5, which is a 4.5 hour difference.
So cocktail hour here is 9:30 in the evening back there. I think I can manage that so long as no one says to me Call me at 2:15 in the afternoon at which case I WILL screw it up.
