Boy, the difference a day can make out here!! One day I am down in the dumps after recording a whopping 92 nm (it turned out to actually be 120 nm, (but that is another story for another time) and wondering if I will even be back in time to crew on J’s boat for Whidbey Island Race Week. The next day we are logging 160 nm and we are looking sss-aaa-ww-eeee-tttt!!!!

Jim and I were moping along the night before last – at one point we logged a meager 2 nm for the hour -- wondering when we might be able to hook into the westerly trades. There is a dense, dense cloud cover throughout the sky for as far as you can see, and it just looks like crap. Then around 0600 in the morning a 15k easterly fills in! An easterly? Wassup with that??? We didn’t ask the question too long. We sheeted in and were on our way.

Over the course of the day it gradually swung around to an 18k SWesterly and we were logging some real miles!! But we knew that at some point we had to pay the piper when the westerly filled in. We were wondering how all of that was going to go down? Were we gonna be stuck wallowing in doldrums? Would the wind continue to clock?

As it turned out, Jim had to motor for about an hour to jump from the southerly to the westerly. But now we are ‘hooked in’ with 500 nm to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. This looks to be real, and we expect this breeze to hold all the way. Guess we’ll see!

So now instead of thinking we might arrive on a Tuesday after 24 days, it looks like we might make it next Thursday after only 19 days. Boy, what a difference a day makes! But it is like that out here on the ocean – things can change very rapidly. Here is hoping (and praying) this westerly holds for us!