POSITION REPORT ON WEDNESDAY 21st MAY 2014 AT 0800

14:51.2S  144:11.8W

So far, we've done 440 miles with 85 miles to go.  In the last 24 hours, we’ve done 130 miles.  We’re now on a close reach doing 5-6 knots in the 6 foot seas, bashing along on a course of 305 degrees towards Kauehi in the Tuamotus.  The sky looks unsettled with scattered showers.  Here's what we did yesterday and overnight.

20 May 2014   Daniel’s Bay to Tuamotus (Day 3)

At our eight o'clock morning fix, we'd done 294 miles with 231 miles to go.  In the previous 24 hours, we’d done 155 miles, so Kauehi was tantalisingly close with an outside chance of getting to the pass tomorrow afternoon.  To give us time to get safely to an anchorage, we'll have to get through the pass at 1500 hrs.   I did some calculations and found that we'd need to average 7-1/2 knots for 31 hours - there's no chance of that, so we're now resigned to sailing at the more relaxed speed of 5 knots and getting there on the morning of the 22nd - only another two nights.

By mid-morning, the wind had dropped further to 10-15 knots, so we  unfurled all three sails and were gliding along at 5-6 knots for most of the day with blue skies and calm seas.

During her watches, Glenys has been catching up on posting a load of recipes to the Galley Slave section of our web site.  She has a small A5 folder with various photocopies and hand written recipes that she's gathered over the years and she's finally knuckled down to put them into her cookbook.  It's quite a bit of work to get it into the correct format and ,of course, there are no photographs of the dishes yet, so I can look forward to her preparing some meals that we've not had for a while, just so that we can photograph them.

As darkness fell, the wind picked up to 15-18 knots and we could see more clouds around, some with obvious rain showers, so I put two reefs in the main ready to handle squally conditions.  It was a very pleasant night until Glenys's 4-7 watch when a big squall hit giving her 28 knot winds and torrential rain.  She ran downwind to reduce the apparent wind, but of course that meant that the rain hammered into the cockpit, so when I got up to give some moral support, she was drenched through to the skin.