It's been quite the slow day. We have made it out of the wind in the Majuro area and have transgressed into the zone of ultra light wind. Right now, we currently are experiencing a blazing 5 knots of true wind, directly on the nose for the course we want. Sigh.... So, we bobbed about for a bit today, followed by motor-sailing. Motor sailing is only a temporary fix for all of the obvious reasons, but it does allow us to proceed direct to our destination for a while. Then we hope the wind will fill in and engine goes to bed. We did get about an hour of some wonderful sailing we had talked about with our friend Bob, who sends us weather forecasts and generally looks out for us while we are on passage. At the risk of digression, Bob and his wife Kristi circumnavigated the globe in the years 1972 to 1974. We love them dearly and consider them to be pretty good role models for anyone, especially us.

But, since the wind is so light, it just won't move us when we are close-hauled. This means pulling the sails in very tight for upwind sailing. All boats have different characteristics and this is one of Proximity's talents. But you must have wind. We tried cracking off until we got movement,but neither port nor starboard would give us anything we could really use. With the light wind we found that we could head could head to the Solomons or up to Mili. So we tried motor sailing. Amazingly, then the wind came around enough such that we could turn the engine off and make a good course. It was a perfect sailing hour.

But, as you know, all good things come to an end. This one came when a big black squall materialized in front of us. We used the engine to steer around it, but then a horizon full of line squalls greeted us. We couldn't go around something so big, so we just punched through. After we were through, the wind direction and velocity had changed back to its light and unusable condition.

Now then, our plan is to motor-sail on course through the night and see what tomorrow brings. The forecasts and gribs all call for something different, so we have hope that the good stuff will materialize. In the mean time, we remain patient. It really is nice just to be out here. Especially now that the rain has lightened up. It is no longer constant. We like that.

Elisabeth and I both send our love to all of you and to Bob and Kristi, our beloved role models!

Oh yes, people always want to know what we eat on passage. It was rough yesterday, and Elisabeth wasn't hungry, so I had a cheese sandwich made from home baked bread that our friend Ants had baked and brought over. For night watch nibbles, we had Ritz crackers. Elisabeth did manage some chocolate. For breakfast, I shared an orange with Elisabeth and a piece of bread with cashew butter. All with nice strong espresso coffee. For lunch, we enjoyed some fresh sashimi tuna that Ants had brought to us. See? Ants is a very good friend, isn't he? Dinner tonight was raviolis (canned) that we had bought in New Zealand. Night watch nibbles will be spicy hot Japanese rice crackers. So we do pretty well. It is not like on land, but pretty good, I'd say. Cheers!