05:32.77S 102:50.68W

Well we've had a busy couple of days. most of yesterday morning was spent taking down the twin poled headsails and setting the cruising chute which worked really well until it fell off at 0600 this morning so most of this morning has been spent trying to get it back into it's chute and stowed away. Next challenge is going to be working out how to rig a new spinnaker halyard.

The water pump decided that it had had enough of working all the time and so stopped working all together. A bit of tinkering later and we've by-passed the pressure switches and running water is now a bit like the joke about how many men does it take to change a light bulb....in our case, one to hold the kettle, one to turn on the tap and one to switch the pump on at the switch board. Having a shower requires a level of trust in ones fellows that is stretching all of us.

We have now made contact on the radio with one of the other boats that we met in Santa Cruz, they are about 60 miles away and would be a lot closer if we had not slowed down to collect the cruising chute.

About 2200 miles to go and have started reading up on what to do in the Marquesas (apart from the washing and a few boat jobs!).

Steve cooked some wonderful corned beef sandwiches for dinner last night using fresh bread from Richard flavored with a little blood from his index finger - absolutely delightful.

Doing 7 knots again under main and genoa, so far we have averaged about 150 a day in the right direction which will do quite nicely.