03:19:96S 102:51:99W Day 5
The Adventures of Sunboy the Sailboat
Al Sparkes and Deb Swain
Fri 28 May 2010 12:25
Now 6.15am on board and about to go back in time one hour as we head further west. All good for those not on watch as they get an extra hours sleep and I get an extra hours watch time :( Cant be all bad though, had a really good nights passage with good steady winds, not much swell and chop and a beautiful full moon to sail by, clocking just over 92 miles from 6.00pm last night to 6.00am this morning and doing 192 miles in the previous 24 hours.
Currently the weather is looking great, clear skies, the moon is setting in the west, still illuminating the ocean like a bloody great lantern and the dawn is breaking in the east. The boat is ticking over nicely under a double reefed main and full headsail, averaging over 8 knots over the ground which is very nice thank you very much.
Had a recurrence of vang problems that we had in the A.R.C where the plate that holds the vang into the boom has cracked again. Last time it was the weld itself which was more of a problem than this current break but as such we went from full main yesterday to a double reefed main with no pressure on the vang to see what 24 hours under that sail configuration would be like. If all is good, may increase a bit of sail today but if we have to stay with this sail set we will still be happy. Just means a bit of welding to be done when we get to Tahiti.
All well on board but Debs has a bit of a sore back and I think that is from constantly trying to place your body into a comfortable position on passage with the swell moving the boat around while you try and sleep so we hope that a bit of pain relief and maybe some good massages will alleviate that problem for her.
Our days are being spent reading, using the I-pods or watching D.V.D's and in Layni's case doing a bit of school work as well and of course Nikki is doing her maths whenever she can plus doing her watches plus helping Deb's out with the cooking. Lukey is still rigourous in his boat checks and doing a really good job with that.
Still havent seen any other boats by visual sighting although thought I picked one up this morning on radar but it was about 20 miles off our port beam so dont know if we will end up seeing it or not. Saw quite a big shark on the surface yesterday, not sure what type it was but out here, a shark is a shark is a shark!! The sea is a bit lumpy from the wind meeting the oncoming current but as the current is helping with our boat speed we are happy to put up with it. At this stage we have about 2100 miles to go and as each day passes we get a bit closer to the Marquesas. So thats about all for day 5 onboard Sunboy. All being well will report back tomorrow with similar passage details as the weather forecast is showing pretty constant conditions as to what we had yesterday :)