At 1300 yesterday, we lost our wind. It just disappeared. It died. It went away. OK, you've got the idea. Thus, we dropped the sails, started up the starboard engine and motored, and motored and motored some more. In fact, we are still motoring and it is 1230 the next day. There has been no hint of the wind returning. The water in the Gulf of Van Diemen is like glass. It is as flat as it can be. Sheeze!

Now, this is not to say that we have not had some excitement. This morning, right on schedule (it is easy to keep to a schedule when you motor); we rounded Cape Don and entered the gulf. Even though the two rules dealing with when to enter the gulf that I mentioned indicate that we should have had a favorable current as we entered, we actually had a slight current against us. It was only about 0.5 knots, so it was not a big deal. However, I had great expectations of riding this powerful current and reaching 10 knots of speed. Well, it never happened. In fact, we did not get an assist by the current until about 1000. Even then, it was only about 0.7 knots.

The excitement came when a heavy fog rolled in about 0900. We are used to sailing in fog from our sailing days along the west coast of California. However, with an exception of a spot of fog along the coast of Queensland, we just have not experienced any fog in the South Pacific.

As our visibility dropped to less than 100 feet, a large cargo ship appeared on the chartplotter thanks to our AIS. It was about 10 miles in front of us and on a direct collision course. I changed our course by 30 degrees to starboard so he could see that I was getting out of his way. However, as I did, two more blips appeared on our radar right in front of us. I had been tracking two other sailboats via the radar for a while and was surprised to find these two new blips suddenly appear. By now the cargo ship was 3 miles away but no longer on a collision course. However, the two new blips were approaching fast and directly ahead of us. As I was figuring out what my next course change would be, the radar now connected the cargo ship with the two new blips in an arc and then added a bunch more blips in a semicircle around our boat! Ahhhh! I get it now. The new blips were just radar reflections from the cargo boat. I decided to change course so I was now heading toward the stern of the cargo boat, which was about to pass me about a 1 mile to my port. As I changed directions, the arc of blips disappeared and just the cargo boat was being shown. Whew. What a relief!!!

We are now making our way through the Gulf of Van Diemen. It is about a 50 nm run before we shoot out the far side and then turn toward Darwin. We should be out of the Gulf around 2100 tonight and if we wanted to, we could arrive at our anchorage at Fanny Bay in Darwin by 0200 tomorrow morning. However, we have a strict rule that we just do not enter unknown anchorages in the dark. This is especially true with probably about 80 to 100 boats sitting there at anchor. We could use our chartplotter and radar to snuggle up between some boats and then drop anchor but why take the risk? Thus, once we get out of the gulf, we will either slooooow waaaaaaay down to about 2.5 knots for the last leg or just heavy to and wait for dawn before entering Darwin. This means one more night of watches but we will be able to anchor in light right after the crack of dawn.

Our position at 1230 is 11 39.5'S/131 36.3'E. We motored 143 nm during the last 24 hours. We have traveled 714 nm so far and just have another 80 nm to reach Darwin. We are so close, we can taste it now! There are still no winds and the seas are flat. The skies are bright and sunny and it is such a beautiful day!