The fairy brings the royal family to see me. Hard for you to see, but the Frog Queen and King have special dresses on as does the prince (Blue footed Booby)... Sorry, everyone is facing away from the camera... except the fairy porter... (What's missing?)

We were all set to leave this morning, with a little final push we had the dinghy on board and things stowed and we were ready to go. Yet, the wind was still up and the forecast wave heights were a little big to make a comfortable ride, so we delayed by a day.

So, the blues seem even more dramatic. We have wind and solar charging our batteries and making water and ice in the freezer. Lara is taking the day to make a couple more things to eat for us to have along the way and Isobel is having fun on the dinghy, which she hasn't had on the foredeck for a while (Yes, the front yard has been converted back to a foredeck.)

For me, I took a nap and looked at weather one more time. A funny thing here, weather. Not that the weather it self is funny, just that I don't get it at all yet. I have four sources for weather: Bob McDavitt is the best as he gives us information that is helpful to just us, where we are on days that we need it. But that is kind of cheating�...

There is weather from Meteo France, in french�... but it seems to give a forceast (sector E 15 -25) only for that day. And it is by zone, and we are right between zone C40 and C45 which have completely different forecasts. And they give wave heights by saying: Peu agite, agite, fort agite (little agitated, agitated or strongly agitated). Does that mean confused seas? I am pretty sure that somewhere there is a reference that would tell me what the difference between "agite" and "fort agite". And they don't say anything about tomorrow�... Kind of good if you want to know if it would be a good beach day or not.

Both the Fiji weather and NOAA weather are South Pacific text forecasts which describe in words. Which is good, because you can see the big picture. I have a piece of plastic that I lay on a chart of the South Pacific and I draw the fronts, troughs and ridges that they describe. Then I draw the "wind 20 to 25 within 100 nm of trough 3 and 4 and S of Front 1 and 2" and I draw "South of 4S and west of 145W waves 8 to 12'" But then they say, in all other areas winds under 20 knots and waves under 8'. But I wonder about trough 1 and 2 and Front 3 and what about that ridge?

So, today, after I had spent an hour trying imply some kind of usable forecast out of my zigzag lines (ridges) and lumpy lines (fronts) and notes and arrows... Bob came through and sent me an email confirming that tomorrow would be fine sailing weather, but not to dilly dally as the winds would go away on Wednesday into Thursday�... Hopefully with 15 knots behind us we can put 250 miles under our keel in a couple days and arrive in Tahiti for some pleasant, but windless weather.

On that note, maybe I should go below the boat again and see if there is anything else to clean off the bottom to maximize our speed�...