12:30pm, Fri July 18
A few notables: coming on deck at about 11pm to a fairly clear sky, no moon yet, and breath taking stars. The milky way is hard to describe at sea. Nico saw a shooting star that broke into 2 pieces, I missed that one.
Lightning under clouds a few miles off last night, that was attention grabbing. The discussion on the roll call on the radio this morning was that the thing to do is put handheld satphone, GPS and VHFs in the oven, the metal box will likely protect them from induced currents in case of a strike. Nothing close to any boats.
There is a boat that retired due to a broken rudder, they are under way with either a spare rudder or steering with a drogue, not sure at this point.
Another boat retired to run under engine, they have to make a work schedule. Their location at radio check in put them in a wind hole we have been angling to avoid, based on the grib file wind forecasts we are watching. The grib files are downloaded directly from NOAA, and are generated by the same computer simulations that they use to do all the TV weather forecasting you see. We can specify which computer model we want, what time sequence, and what area on the earth. It’s pretty cool. They show up as an email attachment that we get via the satellite internet link. We can zoom in on where we expect or want to be in 1,2,3,4 days, all animated.
We’re angling tto stay a bit north of a wind hole south of us, that will dissipate about the time we turn south, should keep winds above 10 knots, in the middle of the hole theres 5 knots to nothing. Right now we have 15.1 knots true. We’re running under our #2 symmetric spinnaker, our biggest one.
We had a spinnaker pole end fail a few days ago, but we were able to fix it well enough, we are using that one upside down, and we have 2 poles. Two poles makes gybing the spinnaker a lot easier, especially in high winds and waves. We haven’t had much of that yet, but may as we approach Hawaii.
Angie will be glad to know the fishing line is set, pretty lure and a flying fish that landed on deck last night. We’re out of the precooked food, first freeze-dried meal last night, which was good. I had another bucket bath just a bit ago. And its a glorious sunny day. Time to go to bed 🙂
avionbianca 