19th June

08 45.420 S

137 17.565 W



Weather; sunny, wind 10- 20 knots, waves 3.5 metres



There really isn't a great deal to say today. The day continued in much the same vein as the previous few days with the sun showing its face and helping to charge the batteries, the wind remained in much the same general direction Ð aft and swinging between 150 degrees port to 150 degrees starboard, the swell became bigger as the night approached but for a change we had a pretty cloud free night and no rain. Our average speed was around 6.5 knots and we mostly flew just the main, occasionally trying the jib or the staysail just for the sheer hell of seeing if it made any difference to our speed or rolling, it didn't so it got furled away again pretty quickly each time. The gen set is still hiccoughing but we are managing to get it to top up the batteries at night for the time being, it's going to be top of the list for things to sort out in Nuku Hiva. Both Gerry and I did some more sleep catching up during the daylight hours and then lost a whole heap more sleep during the ni
ght due to the rocking and rolling which is more severe at night, it's going to be so good to stop moving and sleep in a bed that isn't trying to throw you out! We turned our clock back a further hour to try and get our arrival time right so today's total is for 25 hours but even so we think we did pretty well covering 164 NM and no engine time. We have cracked the 200NM left to go and are hoping that if we can maintain our current speed and direction we should be arriving around tea time tomorrow night so fingers crossed for the final push!

There has still been no sighting of whales or ships and the dolphins are conspicuous in their absence. We haven't bothered fishing as we have a small stock in the freezer and besides we are going too fast for the fish to catch up with us! We have netted a few more flying fish and squid on the deck which have been fed back into the eco system. So that's it for today, I might leave tomorrow's update until after we arrive, depending on how we are going so don't be surprised if there is no regular time up date.