We've been rock and rolling here: Wind from the beam in the mid twenties for a day or so so the seas are building. We were going fast until lunch with Main 1 reef and jib rolled 4 turns, averaging 7.5 knots since dawn but we calmed down the pace to 6 -6,5 for lunch: preparing the food had just become to interesting! We're getting more into the roaring forties paradigm here: NWesterlies, front passage the Westerlies, front passage the SWesterlies until the next low. The lows are significantly further South so the winds won't climb above 30-35 kts average at our current latitude, at least in the next week it seems. Now of course after we reach our waypoint at 42S 120W, 700nm away, we have to go SOuth as well

Our routine is getting more refined:

Exercise this a.m. was some mixture of some ashtanga yoga first series and wild bronco riding... needless to say the balance poses were hilarious when not plain dangeroius! In addition the cabin top has a bad habit of restricting the sun salutes; call them porthole salutes maybe. And the warrior pose might remind you of day-old licorice stick on a wet day... However the crunches were wickedly easy: just do them athwartship and time them with the roll of the boat!

Other than that Janneke is reading carefully the Old Testament and giving me daily a 1/2 hr summary of her current reading (done Genesis and Exodus). Since I had never actually read the OT, my cursory knowledge of that book didn't raise the hair on my back as it does now. That thing is wrong on so many levels, it is hard to comprehend how it has stood the test of time. Revenge, deceit, fear of the other, racism, bribery, self aggrandizement etc... all the values I despise are there front and center, and not just for people but for God herself - oh and yeah how it deals with women! And if we have to place it in its temporal context, let's just do that: bury it some ancient dig to never have it found again! Now I'm going to have to talk to somebody who sees rational merit in the Old Testament and understand why it should be relevant at all. Wish I could have my friend Art Berman here right now.
This would be a good yellow lunch conversation. And I feel like such an ignoramus for having waited so long to get to that reading. Almost finished Naomi Klein. Shit, that woman's good. And actually I can't help see parallel between the values pervasive in the OldTestament and the neo-liberals and Davos class that Klein describes, and even the use of shock therapy on the oppressed economies, eerily biblical it seems.....

As a counterpart to my "Bible Studies", I am going to teach Janneke some math. She's thinking about local politics, and for that one needs some decent grasp of statistics, data analysis and modelization.... or so I think.

Boat is doing well. Watermaker is a bitch but I wrote to the manufacturer and started a "conversation" with a technician there....we'll see.