I got through on the first try with the satellite phone today, and it looks like other things have settled down for the crew. After going between five and a half and seven knots all night, the crew got ambitious today and launched our spinnaker. For non-sailors, the spinnaker is a large (often colorful) headsail used to go downwind. Bud and I had not used ours since trying it out on Lake Ontario. For one thing, until now we didn't have a pole. Ours is rather narrow for a spinnaker. Jack thought perhaps it is a reaching spinnaker. In any case, that's what they were doing with it today and their speed was up to 8 knots. And Travis is now up and about and had the helm when I called.

The night sail was nice, though. Bud said the moon is almost full and so far they've only seen two boats, one sailboat and one freighter, so I think they had the sea to themselves last night.

Jack, who answered, got Bud on the line to try and give me their position. It seems they've been having trouble with the chartplotter. They did manage to get the back-up chart on the i-Pad working and Bob could even use it. But Bud wasn't sure he could get me the latitude and longitude on it. I was about to walk him through that when he said they thought they had something on the chartplotter. I think in the end they figured out they never turned the backlight back up when the sun came up (it has a night mode where it's pretty dim so it doesn't mess up your night vision). Anyway, I got the coordinates so today's position has been added. They had sailed about 6 hours without the chartplotter and they were just a tenth of a degree high of their course, so Bud was pretty happy about that. He said they were basically just sailing to keep the spinnaker full; hopefully the wind holds steady for a while. I plotted the new position and they are doing well, they made another 160 nm in the last 24 hours. As of 4:40 EDT they had sailed almost 330 nm from Marathon, and by my plotting had another 460 nm to go, so during the night they should pass the halfway mark. If they can keep up the speed they should make Galveston Bay by Friday. However, I warned Bud that they might have about 12 hours of really light wind to get through.

Things are going well, still a few glitches. The autopilot, which wasn't working well at all on the first leg, seemed to have healed itself. They used it all night. But then with the navigation lights, and whatever else they had running, they discovered in the morning that the batteries were really low. That is they discovered that when Bud remembered to check the inverter/charger control panel instead of looking at the gauge on the electrical panel. I think that may only be reading the engine start battery and not the house batteries. Anyway, they ran the generator for a couple of hours and went back to hand steering most of the time.

And although Travis is now up and about, Laurene is still seasick. She did eat her first solid food of the trip today. Jack says they have pretty much deeded the forepeak to her. I pointed out that the forepeak (the berth at the very front of the boat) is the part of the boat that moves around the most underway, and might not be the best place for someone who's seasick. But it is private and probably relatively quiet.

Bud said he had to go, as it was time for rum punches on the aft deck, so I know things are going well.