We left Galapagos a week ago. In the last 7 days we've gone 1300nm so we have a decent chance of completing the crossing in around 20 days, given we have 1700nm left. The wind has been a bit frustrating as it is close to being behind us but not close enough to sail on a reach with our wing-on-wing configuration but too far behind us to use our other sails and head directly to our destination, Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. We gave up on the wing-on-wing after a day and since then we have had our genoa set on a pole, our mizzen staysail, and our mizzen pulled all the way out on a preventer. We have found the main luffs too much with the wind shifts, but we may try putting it back out tomorrow if the wind looks promising.

The biggest disappointment has been today finding that we were too far north to see the full eclipse that happened today. We had been alerted by our friend Frank on the Tahina that an eclipse would be happening around the time of our crossing. It stretches from near Papeete all the way to Easter Island. Before leaving the Galapagos, Mark had pulled down the information from the NOAA website, thinking he had gotten everything including the chart show the path of the eclipse, but found out later that we had missed that chart. So we have been working our way south hoping we would see the eclipse today. Dana's mom had sent us information on SailMail about the contraption used to see the eclipse without hurting your eyes and Dana constructed one using a 4 foot length of 4" pipe we had on board. Then, because we didn't have the exact information, we were careful to spend our day mostly in the cockpit waiting for things to get dark. We were ultimately disappointed when we gave up on experiencing the eclipse this time around.

Several days ago, the winds started to die down a bit. Between that and getting our sea legs back, we've been more active aboard and have started working on more and more of our projects. Mark changed the oil in the generator yesterday and today he serviced the large port shackle for the genoa line. The shackle had progressively degraded to the point where it was nearly seized. Tomorrow, we are going to work on servicing the winches, all 12 of them. This is one of the times where you wish there were not so many winches on the boat. This will likely be a 2-3 day project.

Dana has been feeling well enough that she has started reading again and even decided her anti-seasickness wrist bands were not helping her enough to justify the "funky tan lines" they were giving her. However, she was still not feeling well enough to work on the project Mark had been nagging her about for several weeks -- fixing the shower curtain tracks which has been broken or yanked out -- so Mark got to work with a needle and thread and took care of business.

We were able to get in touch via SailMail with our friend, Chris, on the Mooneshine. He responded to our email and suggested a time for us to chat on the SSB (long distance radio). We had been trying for the last week to reach the Pacific Net to talk with other sailor on the same crossing, but without any luck. When we were unable to get a clear connection with Chris, we were both quite frustrated and Dana said "How are you ever supposed to talk to anyone on this stupid thing?" By chance, Mark flipped over to the Pacific Net right then and we were able to chat with Kittywake (?) on the net. It was nice to hear about the other boats on our crossing (5 of them all over 1000 miles ahead of us) and to learn about the conditions they were going through. Apparently, the boats ahead of us had had much stronger winds than we were getting; hopefully that will change.

Until further notice, everything looks good.