Today was pretty uneventful We didn't break anything, or fix anything. The sun was out, there was some wind, and none of the clouds seemed inclined to go over to the Dark SIde and morph into convection cells just yet, so we put our chute up and scooted downwind for most of the day. We kept a close eye on the radar, to watch for any squall "bogeys" coming near. Eventually, they started forming up pretty regularly, and threatening to come close, so we took down the spinnaker and packed it away, before things got gnarly.

There wasn't a whole lot of wind, though, and there were some waves, so a major amount of mainsail slapping happened. By late afternoon, when a big NW swell started to roll through, courtesy of a storm up north off the coast of North America, causing the slapping to reach a fever pitch, we decided we'd had enough. Actually, Eric decided he'd had enough, as I was taking a nap; he pulled down all the sails and fired up Yanmar the Magnificent, who provided us with a much nicer ride.

Now about this ITCZ...two or three days ago, we shot through the coordinates of a fortuitously-positioned gap that had supposedly formed in the ITCZ, according to the tropical discussion that day. Ever since then, every other piece of tropical weather data has indicated that the ITCZ closed up all its gaps and moved S, while we were moving more SW, which meant that we still had to cross it when we got further south. Hmph!

Anyway, we kept the motor on all night long, as the wind did truly die (this must be the doldrums!). We tried to avoid the many squalls that kept popping up all around us. Two of them ambushed me...I had outmaneuvered them so that they would pass behind us about two miles away. Then they stopped moving and expanded (one reaching 13 miles from end to end) right on top of us. Not much you can do with that. So we rode them out. They've been pretty mellow, as storms go; we saw winds only up to the low 20s and lots (LOTS!) of rain. Eric said that the downpour from one squall that he rode through was "like having a line of guys with buckets full of water throwing water on us in succession." So much water. But there's certainly a lot of water available here for making into rain.

When a squall comes, we head into it. If Leela is driving, she does this automatically as the wind increases; the weather helm of the boat tends to overpower her so we head up into the wind a bit. If Bender is driving, we adjust his course to head up. Heading up allows us to depower the sails in case the wind really does pick up, it gets us through the squall in the shortest amount of time, and it makes the wind - and rain - come from ahead of us. The rear part of our cockpit is really wet right now, but not the part under our hard dodger. We do love our hard dodger.

Deck Check: no casualties Miles in last 24 hours: 138 for an average speed of 5.75 knots Total miles traveled: 1768 Miles to go: 1112