John's Blog Updated. Original post with photos: http://travel.reservationkey.com Latitude: 13.49823 Longitude: -116.15942

The first day of April has arrived. It is weird to be at sea while the months go by.

{{90}} Today has mostly been an uneventful day so far. Bruce changed our battery regulator to a cheap car regulator instead of the fancy marine regulator and now we are getting a lot more amps out of the alternator and the batteries are charging up to 14 volts instead of stopping charging at 12.5 volt. This will help our batteries last longer, especially at night. Night time is the only time we have needed to charge the batteries since during the day our solar panels are doing a good job at keeping things topped off. The last few days have been mostly cloudy, but still the solar cells seem to be doing a decent job. Bruce installed a volt meter in the cockpit yesterday so that helps quite a bit with being able to monitor our battery usage.

I have over a thousand movies with me, but so far I have only watched two. I thought I would have time to watch lots of movies, but it turns out we are pretty busy sailing and sleeping so a lot less time for movies than planned. Oh well, better to enjoy the experience of being here instead of letting it all go by watching movies. I did play a little violin yesterday afternoon which was fun. I worked on my improvising skills by trying to play along with the music on the stereo. Caribbean style island music might not be my best choice for learning to improvise since it was pretty tough.

Our topics of conversation continue to be the weather and anticipation about conditions we might find near the equator. That area is known to be somewhat more unsettled with short intense storms, squalls. I have been downloading weather information every day and in the short term things seem pretty consistent. Mostly 8 to 12 knots of wind and 7-8 foot swells. Weather for a long passage doesn't get a whole lot better than that.

The thought also crossed our minds that we hope the South Pacific lives up to its reputation. While making a passage like this is fun, it also is a really long trip and can get a bit monotonous. So we hope we are not disappointed when we get there. The likelihood of that seems pretty slim, but still, these are the things you think about when you have lots of time for thinking.

PS: Note to Dennis Dorch and other people that want to comment on Facebook. It seems I can reply via email to comments left on the photos, but not directly to comments on my wall. Facebook has a nice feature that lets me reply via email to posts, but I think that only is working to comments left on photos. Even though I have a satellite connection, I am not loading FB because it takes a lot of bandwidth and that could get expensive in a hurry. Dennis, if you send me an email, maefius@gmail.com , I want to reply to your last message. I don't have your email address.