Galapagos - Marquesas - Day 5 - 03 13.52S 103 58.92W

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Wed 5 May 2010 00:02
Have been able to sail another 24 hours, but the winds and seas have not been so good. The skies clouded over in the evening and the wind came up to 15 to 20kts on the beam. The sea swell increased to make it a bit lumpy bumpy and it started to rain. Throughout the night low-level cloud came over in bands across our path and it rained and rained, in the pitch black of the night. The good moon was well hidden and didn't appear until the clouds started to break up first thing this morning. We both got wet when on watch - we have a bimini that shades us from the sun, but horizontal rain gets underneath it! We can't really complain as it's the first serious rain we've encountered since we left Trinidad in December.

So most of the night we had 2 reefs in the main and a well reefed genoa, making 6 to 7 kts. The noon to noon run was 160.7 miles, so a bit down on the previous days. Today started well, but as in previous days the winds have been a bit fickle in direction and speed and we are adjusting sails throughout the day. We're looking forward to solid, consistent trade winds where we don't have to adjust the sails for days on end - maybe next week!

With quite high seas during the night, this morning we found 6 small flying fish on the deck and 4 squid. Not sure how the squid got there as we haven't seen the night gulls for a couple of nights, so we assume they must get thrown on board by the waves or have started mimicking flying fish. While we can see ways on how they get on deck, we have no idea how one ended up on the top of the bimini!

Have just seen a small pod of pilot whales go past - they're only small in size, being about 4 to 6 metres in length. We thought they were dolphins to start with.

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