Day 5 was by far the best day of the passage so far for a number of reasons. In no particular order :<\/p>\n

* I had a decent sleep without being woken by a shredded sail or a wet fish in the bed<\/p>\n

* We hooked three mahi mahi. The first escaped. The second was rather small so we used it as bait but it either escaped the hook or was eaten off. The third mahi escaped the triple hook by breaking two of the hooks off. All fun.<\/p>\n

* We made our turn to the Marquesas. It was only about 20 degrees but now we’re no longer purposely going further south than the straight line would suggest. We feel we have good seas and winds and it’s time to run on in. Just another 2,400nm to go.<\/p>\n

* The absolute highlight was being accompanied by a pod of 15-20 short finned pilot whales for about 30 minutes. We saw at least two babies amongst the group who were easily keeping up with our 8-9 knots of boat speed at the time. At times we would see four or five of the whales surfing down a wave. When the whales were close to the side of the boat they were easily seen beneath the clear water as well as being very obvious when they came up for air. On a couple of occasions a more energetic whale would almost clear the water. The larger whales were about half the length of the boat. It really felt like we were the visitors in their domain as they appeared to be simply having fun alongside us.<\/p>\n

* Last but not least I have finally had motions of some consistency since we left Ayora a week ago. Not really blog material but after a week of the alternative the occasion left me feeling pretty pleased.<\/p>\n

I heard from our friends Richard and Kristie aboard Lileth that both their autopilots have failed and they still have a 1,000nm to hand steer to the Marquesas. We wish them good luck. They’ll surely kiss the soil when they arrive.<\/p>\n

In the end I spoiled my day a little by dropping a winch handle overboard. We have another big one and a couple of crappy backups but I’d rather not have lost the first and best one. Will have to make sure we don’t lose the next one before Tahiti.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Day 5 was by far the best day of the passage so far for a number of reasons. In no particular order :<\/p>\n

* I had a decent sleep without being woken by a shredded sail or a wet fish in the bed<\/p>\n

* We hooked three mahi mahi. The first escaped. The second was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-sea","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3358,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions\/3358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}