Hi, Everyone!

Day 5 has begun and all is well. It's been rather light wind so far and we finally turned on our engine just before dawn. We expect to be motoring through this high pressure for about 125 miles or so until we see better breeze to sail. It's about 86 degrees at the nav. station where I'm typing, and the humidity is at 58%- and it's only 0745 in the morning! Looks like we'll be breaking out the sun umbrellas today. A couple of oddities to report: Last night, it almost calm conditions, SOMETHING "slimed" our boat- a total mystery. There were dark stains along the entire deck from the bow almost to the cockpit! WTF did that? Was our Code 0 sail "bleeding?" Were we attacked by flying fish? Mitch has been scrubbing the decks for the last hour, but I have never seen anything like it and and have no explanation. Another oddity is that our Iridium satellite device.... just stopped working. It seemed to just shut itself down and would not come back on. We confirmed we have power going to the unit, so following the manual, we removed the device's battery and reinserted it...and that seemed to restore it to normality. Technology is great until it craps out, leaving you annoyed, frustrated and unnecessarily worried. But that's behind us for now. We can't get one of the cockpit stereo speakers to work, but that's not too big an issue- otherwise all is great on board the good ship Mirthmaker. Scott and Mitch are just awesome crew and I feel very fortunate to have them aboard. We are towing a fishing line and hope to snag something yummy soon. Bye for now!