Wow! What a wonderful dy of sailing we had. We ran the spinnaker rright up until sunset when it was time to prep for the night. We averaged 7-8 knots the entire afternoon and we even kissed 10 a couple of times.Another Catamaran left the reef at the same time we did, and although they were headed to the Hapaii group and we were headed to Tongatapu we stayed neck and neck (on slightly diverging paths) until we made our sail change. It was fun and gve us something to do besides watch for traffic.

Speaking of Traffic - we had a visitor spend a good portion of the night with us. We are not sure if it was a small whale or a large dolphin, but we do know it was a maammal as we could hear it come up for breath. It spent at least 4 hours swimming with us between our hulls and Colin said he could see it through the heads escape hatch/window using the phosporessence to mark it. He estimated it was about 15 feet long! We tried slowing to get it to break away, we revved the engines in hopes of scaring it away; but what finally worked was to heave to for a few minutes. It hung around about 5 minutes,and finally got bored with us and swam away. We are not really sure why he wanted to swim between our hulls, but we were afraid that if he got spooked he could cause some damage to our new rudders and/or props. I wish he had spent some daylight time with us, we have no pictures, and will never be able to identify what it was.

We are quite a bit ahead of schedule today given our marvelous sail yesteday, so we will probably keep our reduced sail settings for the day and just cruise along at 6 knots. We may still arrive at the pass entrance in the dark and may need to stay outside the reef until daybreak. IF the good weather keeps up, it will be another glorious day. It is 78 degrees at 9am and the wind is a very comfortable 15 knots. All is good!