6:50 am Monday, June 9 Relatively speaking, last night was a little smoother than the night before. The swells finally lay down just a little bit around midnight, and the wind shifted to the SE off our port quarter. We had set the double-reefed main again, around 9:00 pm. We still rolled around and got smacked by an occasional wave, but not as often. With the large swell at short intervals yesterday, we stayed down below all day. Malou watched a movie, I napped a little, oh yah, we listened to ABC news over the SSB, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. News about cricket, rubgy, and some sports-related reports from Dubai, Vietman, and The West Indies. To be continued...breakfast time.

4:30 pm Monday Took awhile to get back to writing. Winds from the East Steen made pancakes for breakfast, a noble feat. We decided to eat outside; the cockpit was mostly dry and we had been down below for a day or two. Just as Steen was getting ready to hand me a plate with pancakes, to where I sat in the cockpit, a wave slapped up against the hull and I got a lap full of sea spray. That's the way it goes. The rest of today we have been rocking widely from side to side trying to sail almost downwind to keep our course. Along with being physically uncomfortable, downwind sailing can be psychologically trying. In certain downwind conditions there is very little sense of forward motion, even if you're moving along at 4.5 knots. It can feel like you're at an extremely uncomfortable anchorage. We did do a little tacking back and forth, but the motion wasn't much better we think due to the swells.

46 miles to the first waypoint Good thing we are close. We are trying to get to our first waypoint north of Moreton Island by four or five a.m. (Just a little before sunrise). We only need to go 3, 3.5 knots to make that. Then we would like to get to the entrance of the Brisbane Channel by eleven o'clock or noon to hit slack tide and motor in with the incoming tide. The channel is thirty miles long and has a 3 knot max ebb current, so we would like to go in with the tide and not against.

Dan, you're too kind. You're not sitting there with a bottle of your Mom's homemade vino are you?

7:30pm. We can now see the city lights of Brisbane.