That Math Just Doesn’t Work

Miles traveled last 24 hours: 100
Miles traveled to date: 310
Miles to Hiva Oa: 2,853

No, I haven’t completely forgotten how to do math. Sadly, just because we went 100 miles yesterday does not mean our miles to the Marquesas is 100 miles less than it was yesterday. We’re not actually even pointing towards our destination yet, and last night at one time I swear we were heading for Peru. We’re still going south to hunt for wind. But we’ve been exceptionally lucky so far and have only burned 16 gallons of fuel to get this 310 miles.

We had our spinnaker up from 11:00 am on the 9th to 10:00 this morning. But, sailing with a spinnaker in light wind and swelly ocean limits your maneuverability quite a bit. Last night the winds were really really light so I had to stay on a beam reach to keep it full. And the winds just kept shifting north as they lightened up. But moving that huge sail to the other side of the boat so we can change course requires two people, and I just couldn’t bring myself to wake Rob up to do that. So we lost our current boost (the current is running east to west down here, thankfully) and didn’t make very many miles.

Overnight the clouds settled in, so this morning we dropped the sail and motored a bit to get through some huge areas of rain. We’re not sure down here yet how much wind these squalls may have in them, and we didn’t want to learn the hard way that it’s alot. We were hoping on the other side of the band of rain there would be better wind, but the opposite happened and now we’ve got only 3 knots so we’re still motoring.

On the net this morning when Axel checked in he reported 8 knots of wind from the southeast, which is exactly what we’re looking for. OK, we’re looking for more than 8, but we’re waiting for it to turn to the southeast. They were about 100 miles ahead of us at that point, which happens to be about a day’s travel right now. So we’re heading that way watching for it to turn from the northeast to the southeast where it belongs.

The good news is that on the forecast I pulled up this morning it shows that in 72 hours there are 15 knots of southeasterlies all the way from where we’ll be to the Marquesas. So we’ll just keep plugging along to get down to there and find it, then hope it stays that way for a while.

This morning I had to figure out what to do with all the bananas that became ripe at the same time. Silly me, I thought I could find some interesting recipes that used bananas, but there seem to be only three things you can ever do with bananas. Banana bread (already done that), banana cake (too sweet sounding) and bananas flambe (not going to light a plate of rum on fire in the boat). But I did discover that I can just mash and freeze them and still make banana bread later. In the next couple of days the pears will all be ripe and I’m not finding much in the way of pear recipes either. Guess we’ve got a bunch of pears to eat today and tomorrow.

Teresa