Combat Day! October 23, Day 15. After a nice morning with breakfast followed by a bath in the cockpit, I used the Sat-Phone to call our friend Bob Hanelt who gives us our weather forecasts. The latest from Bob was showing that a convergence zone was forming in front of us, but that it would move across our path to the west before we got to it.

As we spoke, the wind piped up to about 22 knots. Strong, but not a problem. After a nice visit, we hung up the phone and things got interesting. The wind kept coming up. Soon, it was blowing 26 knots and we had a huge black black ominous and frightening looking wall of weather creeping up our back door. Lucky us, the black wall passed behind us, but the wind and seas rose to a bit of a frenzy. We call this combat sailing. The boat is seriously powered up even though we have only a scrap of sail up, and we are flying along despite efforts to slow ourselves down. The waves were hitting us from the side, so we were rolling over and bouncing back up, They would bash and break against the side of the boat with a boom, throwing water clear across the top of the boat, and all over the cockpit.

But, we have been without wind remember? So, in some sort of perverse way, we were glad to have the boat moving. That was our day. It is evening now, and things have settled down considerably. Good. We have had the most wonderful moon this trip, but you know that the moon rises an hour later each day. Tonight it will wait until 10:00 to come up. With the overcast from the convergence, it will be verrrrry dark, so we are happy not to play "combat" tonight.

We are nearly there. We have about 160 miles to go, so a Friday morning arrival looks good. But this, of course, depends on the wind being kind, and that can change anytime. Our friends Stephen and Selena left Wotje for Majuro yesterday. They only had a short distance, about 85 miles to go last night, and today, they got hit with a big black wall of squall packing between 30 to 45 knots of wind. They should be arriving tomorrow, but instead, they had to heave to and have only covered 15 miles today. It is not over until it is over.

Best to all of you, and thanks for being here with us!

As always our position is shown of the right side of the page - just click on the map.

We will continue to keep you posted.

Rod and Elisabeth, "Your Rock and Roll Argonauts"