Sri Lanka to Chagos - Day 5
Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Wed 28 Mar 2012 08:53
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00:50.093S 73:53.340E
March 28, 2012
More of this, please.
Ever since declaring Harmonie a sailboat, we have
sailed. Slowly, but steadily. The weather today is a carbon copy of
yesterday. Extremely pleasant. Light NW breeze (and I mean light -
5-6 knots most of the time), clear skies, flat sea. Who knew Harmonie
could sail so well in so little wind? We've never really had reason to try
it before. It's all relative, of course, some would say averaging 4
knots doesn't qualify as 'sailing well', but given the circumstances, we'll take
it! Not a drop of fuel was used in the past 27 hours, except what was
needed to run the generator for a few hours to charge the batteries. Not
too bad.
Our big progress for the day? 94 miles. It's
possible this is a record low for us. The only passage we can remember
that might have generated lower daily progress numbers was that horrendous
motorslog against 2 knots of current from Ecuador to the Galapagos in Season
One. That, however, was an exercise in frustration, whereas this, is
lovely.
Big Events.
Equator crossing. Our third. Wow. The first
was February 13, 2008 on the way from Panama to Ecuador. The second was
October 16, 2010 while daysailing in Indonesia. The only trouble is, we
crossed in the dark (last night, 9:45), so once again did not see the darn
line. We had moonlight from a quarter moon, and together Venus and Jupiter
were nearly as bright as the moon, but no dice, we saw nothing. We did
share a bottle of champagne with Neptune though, so hopefully our Indian Ocean
crossing will go as well in the southern hemisphere as it has in the
northern. Nothing feels different down here so far. Maybe it's
because we've spent so much time sailing around the bottom half of the world
we've become acclimated to backwards swirling toilet bowl
water.
More tomorrow -
Anne
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