1:45.24N 134:41.94W And now a word from Tom...
Moondance
Alex Belmont
Fri 29 Jul 2011 01:52
So we're just being notified that we haven't updated the blog for more than a week... Oops... Sorry for that. We'll try to be more regular in the future... Time just isn’t the same on a boat at sea... Also the Spot Tracker device stopped working, we're out of range, and should remain so until we reach the Cook islands.
All is well on Orianne, we're are making fairly good progress finally. We got something over 700 miles to go, which should be about a week.
I'm trying to reflect on what happened over the past week, but really, not much... We struggled quite a bit in the doldrums, with squally weather, rain, contrary winds and a lot of current against us, but now we broke through and the sky is clear. The wind is steady if a bit light, and we entered a favorable current, so we are rarely dropping under 5 knots and we did over 7 knots for a few days. The wind is southerly with sometime some east to it, and so we are struggling to beat into it to make it far enough south to reach Nuku Hiva. We have been close hauled for weeks but it is not that bad as the seas are calm and I guess also we're getting used to it. The boat is constantly heeled over to starboard though and that can get annoying for cooking. Otherwise we haven't broken anything really, except the shackle for the vang, which was badly mounted. We're please with our preparation of the boat. So far over 3000 nautical miles on the log and no major disaster.
Life on board is slow and relaxed, we don't do much as the boat pretty much sails by herself...The highlights of our days is usually the midday meal, the rest of the time we loaf around, reading, playing card, sleeping or watching movies on the computer. We have a lot of power from the towed generator I put together, although the down side of it is that we can't have fishing lines out while towing the prop. As a result we haven't caught a single fish since leaving La Paz. We'll have to work on that.
okay, that's it for now.