Another crashing stop, we have run out of wind. Winds are light (5 - 8 knots) but we are now going directly down wind at around 1.5 - 2 knots. Miles covered in the last 8 hours is a whopping 15 miles. Glad we packed the Spam.

More clarification on crashing to a stop We broke out the spinnaker this morning and were really moving along with just the spinnaker up. It was a beautiful sight, the colorful spinnaker set against the blue sky etc., I should have taken a picture. For about 20 minutes a nice block of wind in front of a squall cloud had us cruising along at 5 knots. Right about then there was a big gust and the spinnaker exploded into red and white confetti. It would have been festive watching all the colorful streamers if it had not been so demoralizing. Oh well, it was old.

Since we had all the sails down sorting things out and the wind had died completely, I took a moment to get in the water and scrape the outrageous growth of goose neck barnacles that have exploded at the waterline around the stern. In three weeks time, we have hundreds of inch long barnacles stuck all over the hull. I thought that they were just at the water line, but realized that there are thousands more on the hull underwater. These are smaller, but there are lots of them. I had thoughts of getting the mask and snorkel and cleaning the hull (clean hull =3D faster boat) but the advice we had gotten was not to spend more than 10 minutes in the water. Apparently that is the limit before the larger inhabitants of the deep get curious and come to visit. About 8 minutes in, I was suddenly face to face to with a very cute pilot fish that was swimming under the boat. He was cute and only about 10 inches long, but the shock at seeing anything caused my adrenaline to max long before my brain could process what I was seeing. That took all the fun out of being in the water for me.

Other than the sail, all is well.