March 19/ Day 19 report - less than 500 miles to go
20 March 2023
• 10 43 S 130 33 W
by Ken Hilk
We've now been at sea for over two and half weeks and the crew is holding up very well and working together to keep the good ship
Lover Of The Light sailing on. We are just passing the 500 mile to go mark as I write this on the midnight watch.
We had an interesting day today. We got the rebuilt alternator back on to the gen set, fired up the generator, and it worked. The
bearing in the alternator is not going to last much longer, but maybe it will get us to the Marquesas. With the generator running,
we parked in the middle of the ocean for three hours to make fresh water to supply our tanks. While doing that, we lowered the
large 125 genoa sail onto the deck and replaced the genoa halyard. This was a pretty good feat since we could not really avoid
being in a seaway with 4-5 foot swell waves rolling through and a 16 knot breeze blowing. Never ideal conditions for lowering a
large heavy sail onto the deck. It was a team effort as Ken and Darcy affixed the new halyard, hoisted about 2/3 of the genoa,
then Hunter winched it the rest of the way up while Darcy fed the genoa luff into the track up in the pulpit.
While standing in the pulpit, the bow of the boat was rising and lowering a good 10-12 feet, and getting green water over the bow
sprit in the process. Darcy and Ken were rewarded for these efforts however when three to four large pilot whale dolphin showed
up right under the bow to help us along with our task! These pilot whales I understand are the largest animals in the dolphin
family, and had big whale like grey spotting on their backs, with very large tails. Really cool animals.
After getting under way again, our wind went a lot lower in pressure, before coming back in to about 14-15 knots this evening. We
set the main sail at full with sheets all the way out, and poled out the genoa sail on the windward side of port tack. Before sun
set, we had a significant wind shift to just south of east, and we went up and gybed the pole back to the leeward side of port
tack. So we are now running wing on wing port tack, dead down wind.
The last thing to report is that while on night watch last night, unbeknownst to the skipper who was on watch, a ten inch long
flying fish flew through a cabin hatch way into the saloon cabin, hit Hunter in the chest and bounced into the hallway of the
saloon, fully traumatizing Darcy this morning when she woke up!
Just saw a long-running shooting star, right below the Southern Cross.
Somehow,it just really is not boring sailing over 3000 miles across the ocean :).
Distance sailed: 2,727.5 miles
To Hiva Oa: 499 miles
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