YIT, back to living on a slant, hillocks, critters, and The Numbers
27 June 2018 | On passage from NZ to Fiji
Vandy
I didn't get around to updating the blog yesterday. Apparently I was too busy, or I just needed a nap instead of writing. In any event, I'll catch you up now.
First, though, I want to mention Yachts in Transit, abbreviated YIT. This is a website - www.yit.co.nz - maintained by some great folks in Gulf Harbour, NZ, where we send our daily status, position, and weather conditions update. You can access our daily update by going to the YIT website and clicking on SCOOTS. Even if I don't happen to get around to updating our blog on some days, I'll almost always send YIT an update.
After a day or so of comfortable downwind sailing, with our main down and our jib poled out, we're back to a beam reach, starboard tack this time, so all the stuff on the right side of the boat that we may not have stowed properly now has a chance to relocate itself to the floor or to the other side of the boat, depending on whether it has the ability to roll or not. Of course, the wind change that we'd been expecting finally came around at about 1 am, just as we were switching watches. So we decided to go ahead and take down the pole and put up the mainsail right then. When you're on passage, day and night are kind of interchangeable. The weather doesn't care what time it is, so neither can we.
The wind has been blowing a steady 15-20 knots, and is forecast to blow even harder. Only the direction has changed during our time at sea...from SW to S and now to SE, where it will stay until we arrive in Savusavu in a few days.
A couple of days ago, we began sharing our piece of the ocean with some big swells. Swells are the friendly kind of waves, not to be confused with wind waves, which are the snarky delinquents or thugs of the wave world. These broad, 3.6 meter (about 12 feet) swells roll across the ocean, like big rounded hillocks (Eric came up with that description, which I think is pretty appropriate), coming up behind SCOOTS and gently lifting her up and giving her a scooch forward, before setting her down and continuing on. Predicted to gradually subside, they'll still be a respectable 2 meters high by the time we're done with our passage.
We've had some big flying fish on our decks lately; four were there when we got up yesterday morning, having perished during the night. Joshua Slocum probably would have fried them up for breakfast; we just threw them back into the sea. Late yesterday afternoon Eric was able to toss back a dazed but still live flying fish; lucky day for the fish .
Oh, and speaking of critters...some masked boobies, Eric's nemeses from our passage to Fiji last year, did some fly-bys today to say hello (though they didn't try to land on the solar panels).
The Numbers at 96 hours Position: 25* 32.51'S, 176* 18.24'E Course: 015*T (NNE) Speed: 6.0 knots Wind: 18 knots at 203*T (SSW) Seas: 3m swell from the S Barometer: 1024 Weather: sunny with a few white puffy clouds Miles gone: 658 Miles to go: 547 Critters: 5 flying fish on deck, shearwaters and petrels flying around