322nm to go to Marsden Cove. All is well aboard.
Another t-shirt day. In fact, when inside I had to take even that off, it was too warm. Is this really the same patch of ocean we’ve traveled twice before?
And we’ve made some good progress. On the morning net we heard the boats 60nm south of us were in light air and motoring. They’d run into the high which we’d been trying to avoid. In fact, it was my primary reason for leaving on Sunday and not earlier as this was a likelihood. Through a combination of luck and judgment the wind was lightish throughout the day but by the time we reached that latitude we had good wind. In fact, overnight we’ve made very good progress. The wind has shifted some 30 degrees but stayed stronger than forecast. If we keep this up we’ll be in early Sunday morning although I strongly suspect it’ll be late Sunday. We’ll see. Aboard time for arrival is defined not in terms of days but numbers of night watches left – nobody likes them.
We had some other good luck too. During Lissa’s morning watch we caught a fish. Lissa reeled it in. It was a smallish skipjack tuna on a lure where I’d fashioned a double hook. One of the hooks had torn it’s throat out so it looked a little beat up. Later, we found some deck catch – a squid. The squid took it’s turn on the hook and by the end of day we caught another fish. Lissa again reeled it in and again it was a skipjack, smaller than the first. Neither were kept.
Overnight we had another clear sky. I spent a while on my back on the roof of the cabin watching shooting stars. The Magallenic Clouds were clearly visible ahead of us, showing us the way to New Zealand.
One thing I forgot to mention in yesterdays blog was that I’ve also made some progress making short term fixes to the runners for our sliding door. Both had broken plastic flanges which served to hold the door in its groove. Not the sort of thing that can easily be glued back together and really needing full replacement. However, I discovered a French Polynesian 2 franc coin was just the right size and width to glue onto the side and create some structure to hold the plastic together. Unfortunately we only had one. In the end the second runner was fixed by cutting a similar sized shape from one of Helen’s old store cards – glad we kept them.
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