Wow, we are really moving. We have been 7-10kts the last two days. It is a wild ride with 20-25kts wind off our port quarter. We are at 670nm to Fatu Hiva (we decided to make landfall there instead of Hiva Oa)... potentially only 3 or 4 days to go for the passage. Knock on wood.

The down side to making such good time is that at this speed the boat yanks much harder as it is moving through the waves. That makes it harder to do other things such as cook, shower, or sleep as the boat is really moving. We normally have the autopilot responsiveness (the rate at which it adjusts the rudder when we change direction) at level 1 or 2, but we have increased it to 5 to keep our course stable.

There has been much more cloud cover the last couple of days and some small squalls, but the wind patterns have largely been steady. Mark took his first sextant sighting (of the sun) the other day and spent 2 days trying to work out the math. He thinks he understands all the crazy trig stuff that you have to do, but couldn't take another sun sighting this afternoon to check that.

We have started to regularly run into boats. We passed one last night and today we had to adjust course to pass a small freighter about a mile off our starboard.

We had a nasty smell coming from the aft head. At times it was really powerful. While we thought it was effluent, with some tests we found it was really a smell coming from the bilge (which just has grey water from the showers and sinks). Apparently, the issue is that when hair gets into the bilge it makes an awful smell; you really do not want any hair to get into the bilge. It turns out several weeks ago we changed out the type of filter we use for the shower drain and so probably hair is getting past that and into the bilge. We drained the bilge with the automatic pump and ran the hand pump (which gets the last bit of stuff) and then poured a good deal of bilge cleaner and it appears the smell has gone. We'll swap back in the filters tomorrow. The joys of being on a boat.