John's Blog Updated. Original post with photos: http://travel.reservationkey.com Latitude: 17.2235 Longitude: -109.13862

Another pleasant day has passed, with each hour we slowly gain our sea legs and become more comfortable In our water world. We are now just over 300 miles out from La Cruz. During our first 24 hours we covered 145 miles.

The big event today was unpacking and launching our brand new spinnaker for the first time. Besides being a momentous occasion in itself, it also indicates that the wind is slowly making its way around behind us which means we are closer to getting into the trade winds. Launching the spinnaker went smoothly, especially thanks to a net Bruce hung in the foredeck to prevent the spinnaker from getting caught around the jib. We have had the spinnaker up all afternoon and we are making good time with it, even in light winds.

Lunch was a delicious meal of barbequed hamburgers and fresh mango. So far none of our fresh items have spoiled, but we are closely monitoring everything and eating the fruit as it ripens. We fished all afternoon yesterday but no bites so far.

The night watches have been going smoothly. Francois is now taking a watch which means we are sharing three hour shifts between four people which allows for nice stretches of uninterrupted sleep. During my watch I noticed some bright lights on the distant horizon but could not figure out what they were since we are rather far from any land. Bruce concluded later that the lights were from Cabo San Lucas, which was directly north of us by 320 nautical miles. I also had fun trying to see if I could pick up any radio stations from America on my little AM radio. Amazingly, I could just barely make out KCBS 740 from San Francisco. I will keep trying because the skip signal can vary from night to night. Pascale has the 6am watch and she said that at sunrise she noticed lots of birds circling our boat. It turned out that they were hungrily eyeing the many small squid covering our decks which had landed there during the night.

We have been very happy with the performance of our satellite modem. Bruce is now all set up on it and has been using it to manage his rental properties, and also to get tech support via email on an issue we are having with our radar system (no data is getting to the chart plotter). And I've been getting online keeping up with my Reservation Key tech support and downloading the latest weather.