Enroute to Easter Island - Day 4

We got out of the washing machine yesterday evening. We think it was an area of counter-current, making the seas steep and confused. All of a sudden, without any change in the wind, things smoothed out a little.

So far we have seen one fishing boat--our first night out of the Galapagos, 2 seagulls, and a lot of flying fish. No other boats, no marine mammals. It's a big empty ocean out here.

Today our focus has been to keep the boat moving at a reasonable pace, and stay dry. We want to sail at around 5.5-6 knots, but it's a struggle. The wind has been up and down all day. We get everything trimmed up just right and we're humming along at 5.8 knots, and then the wind comes up a few knots, and we start tearing along at 6.5. Faster is usually better, but in this case, it means we bash harder into the waves.

The waves, though not crazy like yesterday, are still big and still pretty much on our beam. Every now and then one breaks over us, and water washes down the deck and over everything. Occasinally when the wind comes up, we heel so far over that we bury the lee rail in the water. We have our cockpit enclosure to thank for staying mostly dry. But we've got so much foamy water on the lee rail that we have a salty mist in the cockpit, and everything is coated in salt.

We have kept 2 reefs in the main, and the staysail up, and use the roller furling genoa to slow us down or speed us up. Most of the day it has been blowing close to 20 knots, so we've varied between a 'scrap' and a 'bedsheet'. Right now our genny is only out about 8-10 feet. It isn't shaped very well when we've got it rolled in so much, but we don't care.

The forecast for the next few days is pretty much the same. The GRIB files say the wind should drop off a few knots from today's 20 knots, but not change direction much. So we'll be hard on the wind for a few more days.

With only Dave and I aboard, we are doing 3 hour watches through the night. This gives us each about 5-6 hours of night-time off-watch sleep, and we supplement that with a nap during the day, and cat naps during our watches. On Soggy Paws, we are permitted 15-minutes at a time while on watch, to cat-nap, read, or whatever. We use a kitchen timer loud enough to wake us up. After a couple of days of night watches, you get pretty efficient at sleeping in 15 minute segments, poking your head up to check on things, and then going back to sleep again. Or read... or work on the computer.
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At 3/6/2010 2:07 AM (utc) our position was 07°05.05'S 096°27.39'W

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