John's Blog Updated. Original post with photos: http://travel.reservationkey.com Latitude: 12.38482 Longitude: -120.22643

Not much is happening today. Just lying on my bunk reading on my Kindle for most of the day so far. I'm reading Catch Me If You Can, which is a great book as well as a great movie. I really enjoyed the movie, but never read the book. So far, it seems that the movie follows the story in the book very closely. I've also gotten hooked on the HBO series, The Wire. I never saw any episodes before, and have five seasons stored on my computer to make my way through. It is about criminal detectives fighting drug dealers in Baltimore. Some of the criminal law elements in the show remind me of my days as a prosecutor in the tough and criminally active town of Modesto, which is kind of fun.

Yesterday afternoon our forward head (toilet) would not drain so Bruce had to undertake the messy job of disconnecting the hoses and tank and snake out the hoses. It looks like mineral deposits had built up inside the discharge hose to the point where the tank would not drain. Since the tank was almost full, it weighed around 300 pounds. Bruce tied ropes to it and Francois and I helped lift it into position by pulling on the ropes up on deck while Bruce pushed the tank back into its shelf from inside the sail locker. We plan on emptying the tank more often now, which will help avoid these issues.

Today brought with it the heaviest weather of the trip so far. We have winds gusting to around 20 knots and rougher seas plus a little rain. The GRIB weather files I have been downloading predicted this exactly right and show similar weather for the next four days. The good news is that we are able to make really good time. We were doing around 8 knots for a good number of hours and hit a top speed of 10.2 knots momentarily.