10:30 am your time
cog 250 sog: 7.5 stw: 8.2k
Wind SSE at 15kts

Sun up 1/2 hr ago; beautiful sunrise with that extraordinary orange light behind the clouds
Nina Simone blasting on the stereo for breakfast... God she's good.
The boat is galloping west under main and reacher on quiet seas.
All is perfect.
Only dark spot is that little fuck of a 1 knot current against us.
We're basically sailing due west at 3d of latitude south. We'd loose the current by going south but that would mean slower and less comfortable sailing because we'd have to be on a close reach at 60d from the SSE wind. So we try to play the windshifts and head further south on favorable shifts. The water temp just dropped by a tenth of a degree C, maybe telling us that we're getting on the southern edge of that counter current. The prevailing equatorial current is setting west; the little fuck is setting east and is robbing us of about 45nm a day. But since everything else is perfect I ain't complaining Neptune; I'm totally at peace with you man!

NAthaniel just came back below with a squid (read snack): these guys fly out of the water really high; yesterday I found one which had landed on top of the solar panels (8ft above the sea surface)! It'll end up in the pan with a little olive oil after this mail.

So yesterday 2 things happened of note:

1. A little before sunset Nat was talking the famous but elusive green flash. SO at sunset, the light seemed promising, there were no clouds on the horizon and the sun was a big orange ball.... so we looked. And yes we saw it. So now we part of a select few who have seen the flash. We're not proud. Just sayin'.....

2. Food. As all great French chefs, starting with my brother Jose, argue that good ingredients make a dish. Although I'm not a great chef, even if I probably serve an acceptable table, I concur.
So yesterday night I set up to make a boeuf Bourguignon a la Taya with nothing but the finest ingredients:
a. this bunch of beautifully limp carrots with a few patches of the original orange color still showing under the mold, in select places. By the time I had peeled them the volume of the "peels" was far in excess of the serviceable carrot flesh.
b. Then I retrieved our fine Maryland potatoes, a march 14 2015 vintage kept in a humidity controlled cellar at exactly 89F for the last 3 weeks. Some of their sisters had transmuted into potato fluid in which flavor enhancing maggots were floating joyfully (that was the subject of my clean up last week). The ones I used were chosen for their pre-transmutation state.
c. a fine onion eagerly waiting to pass on
d And the wine... ah the wine: Making a Bourguignon without a great wine is as hopeless as sailing to windward with old sails. Fortunately I had no trouble spotting a bottle of great wine. Nathaniel had filled an empty bottle of seltzer water -BPA enhanced of course- in the not-too-recent past, with the leftover of a Spanish box wine bladder bought a couple years ago in the cradle of wine making: the canary islands, of course.
I then used the pressure cooker to cook to perfection the above ingredients, leaving out the meat which was to be added at the end. So far I had the making of a good Bourguignon but not of a great Bourguignon. Adding the meat is what pushed the recipe over the top, into the rarefied world of dishes concocted at Michelin 3 stars restaurants: I took a can of our finest Spam (pigs and cows are both mammals so just shut up, ok?) that I added to the cooked vegies and I let the mixture simmer for a while.
Result: A Bourguignon that a sailor would love. And we finished it in 1 setting, no leftovers!

And now the AIS alarm just went off and it looks like we have another sailboat 4 nm north of us on about the same course. They're going faster so I do hope that they're bigger! We'll see as they get closer. I'll raise them on the VHF


2:41pm
A couple of hours ago we crossed paths with Savarna, a 53 ft Kiwi boat and chatted for a while on the radio. They're going to Hiva Oa as well. We took some pictures of them and as it happens they had also taken pictures of us. They'll send the pictures to my slooptaya@gmail.com account. Although since they have Iridium like us I doubt that they do this before they get a internet connection on land. We'll keep in touch with them through Iridium during the passage. They are going about a knot and a half faster than us (they're much larger so they should get there a few days ahead of us. )