After another uneventful night of light air upwind sailing our ETA is starting to look a little more firm. Right now we are about 150 nautical miles from the harbor we will be clearing in to. One of three things will happen – the wind will pick up, the wind will die, or the wind will stay like it is.
If the wind dies or it picks up we will arrive in the morning. We will either sail faster than our current 5-6 knots or we will drop sail and motor. If the wind stays as it is we will keep puttering along like this and arrive under sail in the afternoon. Fortunately the wind, while a bit lighter, has shifted to the Southeast. This has allowed us to be enough off the wind to hoist the stay sail again which as of now is helping us maintain speed.
Let’s keep out fingers crossed though, we’ve had sailing wind most of the trip I’d hate for it to poop out with so little time left.
A few observations
- Since getting further off shore there is less trash than on the first two days. A closer look at the prevailing currents show a circular current near the coast of Central America, I credit this with keeping a lot of that floating plastic within 200 miles of land.
- Apparently it WAS a lunar eclipse we witnessed on my watch. That was pretty cool.
- We’ve not had great conditions for stargazing. Offshore you see stars like you would not believe. Unless there is a full moon bright enough to almost read by. Or clouds. Or both.
- We REALLY need some new Field Guides. We didn’t have much luck finding South Pacific guides before we left and ours are mostly Atlantic and North Atlantic. A lot of the critters are the same, but there are a lot of new ones here we’d like to ID.
- I suspect there may be some field guides available in some of the Visitor Centers along with the T-Shirts with unusual critters on them.
- You can do some pretty decent cooking off shore even within the context of casseroles and one-pan solutions which are really the best things to do.
- We’ve seen more off shore birds here in the Pacific than we saw sailing in the Atlantic. Still waiting for an Albatross.
