Well, it's Day 13 of the Vic-Maui and we can definitely feel that we are in the 20s latitudes! It's hot. Days have remained cloud-covered but we are complaining less about that now as the deck heats up, the layers peel off, and crew begin dumping buckets of sea water over each others' heads. We have been sticking to a wing-on-wing sail plan for the last few days after additional attempts at flying spinnakers did not work out for various reasons (angle, seaway, wrong sail shape ...). We are a bit down of layline to Maui as we sail low when we can in case the breeze lightens in the next few days and we want to come up. We're moving along at a nice clip - we have yet to make an over-200 mile noon-to-noon daily run, but from 10pm last night until 10am this morning we had a 106 mile run. We'll see if we can make another 100 nautical miles by ten tonight! About 550 miles to Maui! Anticipation is increasing on board as we run out of our tasty food and the layer of salt and grime gets thicker. Soon, we'll be eating trail mix and pilot bread - yum! Actually, Benjamin is currently cooking up (his day to be the cook) something that smells delicious, I have to say. Lentil salad with some sort of rice pilaf dish containing dates, cashews, celery, almonds, chicken stock ... not too shabby for day 13! Becky, Mark, and I saw a whale today traveling north east - fin or blue, we think. This is one theme song that has developed over these days at sea: This trash is your trash, this trash is my trash In the great Pacific, oh the sea of plastic From California, to the Sea of Japan This trash was made by you and me.

Another one is the theme from Rawhide, but we'll get to that in another entry.