Fish scales

Yesterday, Doing a walk around the boat inspection in the morning, and Jeff finds a pile of fish scales, and a kinda splat mark on the cabin roof.

Eeew!

Torsten reported hearing so.ething go bump in the night. Haha! Poor surprised flying fish...

Imagine that poor fish. Wheeee! Whump! What the?!.! LOL

~e.

Typos

I reread the email I sent last night. So many typos. Sorry, friends. Bear with me! :)

First off: * right * we were going north, we turned to the east, that is a *right* turn. LOL. 

If I could, I'd go in and edit these things... sigh. Color me embarrassed.

Here's a pretty first star at sunset picture. :)

~e.

Fishing

This boat came with some fishing gear, and Jeff brought some. 
Today we dropped a couple lines and are trolling as we sail. 
We had one quick curious hit, but did not hook up. 
I'll let you know how that goes. :)

Typos

I reread the email I sent last night. So many typos. Sorry, friends. Bear with me! :)

First off: * right * we were going north, we turned to the east, that is a *right* turn. LoL.

If I could, I'd go in and edit these things... sigh. Color me embarrassed.
~e.

Detour!

I don't know if yall can tell from our track on NoForeignLand, but we made a pretty hard left turn and ran east for a while last night.

When I posted the "golden hour" log entry, a note came in from my Dad.

He informed us that he could see on a MarineTraffic.com website that there was a cluster of AIS targets directly in our projected path.

In our preparation for this passage Jeff and I had read reports about fishing practices in this region. What my dad described in his email was consistent with reports of Chinese fishing boats leaving to drift, or towing a long net, and marking the net with buoys that transpond an AIS identification signal.

My dad sent several emails with clear description of how many, how far apart and how long all together... and where we were projected to intercept. Text book traffic control!

We had some funky latency delays in our email exchanges... but! We had a pretty good idea what we were looking for.

At the local level: weak sea-level buoy transponders and the not incredibly powerful antenna that we have on the mast, meant that we didn't pick up the targets until they were about 6 miles away.

At which point we already had a plan.
We furled (automatically rolled up on the foreatay) our jib, tightened up on the mainsail, fired up an engine, and turned east. We ran a course that anticipated would take us along the net (a few miles distant) to what we thought was the end, after the last buoy.

That's when I went to bed. And when I came back up for my midnight watch, the guys were shutting down the engine, setting the sails, and heading north again.

Just a little 4 hour maneuvers drill. These are your prayers in action folks!! We got to run east. We avoided what may or maynot have been a thing* we had some ideas of what was out there even though we couldn't see a thing!

* the net could have been at se significant depth that we wouldn't have noticed of we'd crossed it... but then again... maybe not! We could have hooked something without rudders and then who knows?! (Not me. Because we took a detour!)
Love and light
Fair winds
~e.

Golden Hour

It's the golden hour before sunset here in the little latitudes. And it couldn't be any prettier. 

(I'll call myself a liar in half an hour at sunset, probably.)

A quiet day here on Hiva Oa. Light winds (under 10 knots) all day. Right now we are doing 5knots in a light 7.5 breeze. 

The wind waves have diminished to sweet lapping ripples and a totally manageable easy swell rolling in from California (or that direction anyway).

And now just before dinner we shut down the generator (which is working like a champ - thanks again to Torsten's many hours of labor) after running it and the R-O water maker for about two hours to refill the starboard water tank.

Plus we took the opportunity of making water to use some! We all showered! Washed another t-shirt or pair of shorts ... and cooked pasta!

We are all comfortably settling into our evening and prepping for a quiet night.

As my friend, April, says: "Love hard and pray hard." (Or something close...lol)

Love and light,

~e. 

Light winds

Another light wind day, but strong sun!
We are all sticking to our big shady cockpit or inside work today... and wearing sunblock!

The wind was down to about a 5 knot average this morning and we actually ran engines and sail for a few hours 0530 to a little after 1000.

Now it's like 7-8 on the mast and 5-6 on deck. We've got all the biggest sails trimmed for max boat speed, and we are letting autohelm keep us at about 52° off the wind.

We are heading north-northwest, which is a little disconcerting to be giving up our "east" that we had "banked" already, but...

Que serà, Serà. and...
This is cruising. (apparently! LOL)

It's a quiet afternoon. I think we are all pretty well caught up with any sleep deficits, and so we putz with little projects (fix this, reattach that, wash some stinky t-shirts) read our novels, do some sudoku puzzles, look for text messages, and emails (hint, hint!)

Love & Light,
~e.