Aloha all,
This will be a short update tonight.
It’s Day 25 of Leg 14 of the Worldwide Voyage, and we approximate we are a little over 1800 miles in on the course line from Mauritius, which means just about 500 miles left to go. We’re still several miles off our plotted course line, but are taking the wind shifts as an opportunity to make some of that up. Last night, for example, we sailed a house higher than our course line to do just that.
Captain Bruce has compressed the watches into 6 hours each at night – this means instead of 2-6, 6-10 and 10-2, we are now on 12-6 and 6-12. The swell and wind have been up – big swells of 20+ feet rolling by us, and bursts of 25+ knots for the wind. We’re currently using all three sweeps for steering, as the big water sloshes us around. We made good progress today, even with the conservative sail set we’re currently running. We were still going too fast with the storm sails, so we are now running just the mizzen storm sail with a 70 square-foot mizzen staysail and a 60 square-foot jib. With that sail set, and the now moderate seas, we’re able to hold at a steady 5.5 knots that puts us closer to our escort.
Everyone is in good health and well fed. We went back to the basics tonight – miso saimin and spam musubi. Garnish included dried shrimp, spam, tofu and vienna sausage. The hot meal did everyone good, and all those not on watch are resting.
Stars are up and the night shift is settling into the groove as we transition into the next watch. Mahalo to you all for following, we’ll have more tomorrow as the weather starts to diminish a bit and everything settles down.
Standing by, as always, channel 71.
Nāʻālehu
Please help keep us sailing for future generations. All contributions make a difference for our voyage. Mahalo nui loa!