***Life on board***
Another beautiful day in the South Pacific here onboard the WTP. We had grits and tuna scrambled eggs for breakfast and for dinner Adam made a chili soup with rice AND cornbread. Man we sure are suffering our here. We also opened our bag of Ginger Snap cookies that we bought in Panama. I wonder how long those will last.
I spent a lot of my day, when off watch, working on my navigation and taking sun and moon sights and plotting our fixes. My best fix today put is within 5 miles of our true position once again after deviating a little overnight.
After dinner we watched another episode of the BBC mini series "South Pacific". We learned that a type of bird we have spotted out here on the ocean can stay airborne for 4 YEARS continuously! No wonder they are so far out here. I wonder if they will fly their whole lives and never see land.
We have made our first time zone change since leaving Galapagos. We are now in what is called "Mountain Time" in the mainland US. Out here however, it's called "zone time" GMT +7. That is, you have to add 7 hours to get to Greenwich Mean Time. We are 2 hours behind Eastern Standard Time. But with daylight savings time it is 3 hours.
We are making increasingly more miles each 24 hours with each passing day. If we keep up, we may have our first 200 nm day! We are no doubt being helped by the South Equatorial Current that is pushing us along toward Marquesas but we don't have a way to directly measure the speed of the current having no "speed through water" sensor on board. We are however, moving decidedly "faster than normal" compared to the feel of our speed when we are not in any current which we can usually judge pretty accurately.
***Communication***
We slept in this morning and missed the Barefoot net but checked in for the afternoon net with our position. All boats are well and making good progress.
***Weather***
As stated, the weather is unchanged owing to the steady trade winds in these latitudes in this time of year. Steady, SE wind.
Position (11:40am):
05 deg 06' S
106 deg 38' W
Alan and the Crew