Thursday, March 4, 2010

Galapagos to Easter Island Day 10

Pacific Ocean
22 34.2S, 107 34.7W
1615 nm SW of Galapagos
0700 report

It is a quiet morning here. Winds eased overnight and engine went on at 0245. Wind, now blowing only 3 - 5 knots just south of SE, is supposed to lessen as the day evolves. The seas are quite pacific at this moment, which is nice, but this means we need decide whether to burn more fuel and make landfall by late Friday, or take it easy and arrive Easter Island first thing Saturday. Right now we are motoring with mainsail up, but wind is too little to make a difference. We are burning about 1.5 GPH at 1100 RPM moving around 7 knots, and will hold this for a while until we have to slow down in order to arrive Saturday morn with some light - just about 48 hours from now.

Sky this morning is similar to yesterday. A beautiful sunrise lights a distant and encircling ring of high clouds ahead of us, with segments of rain fall at various points around the horizon. Yesterday we sailed through this by late morning and I hope we will do so today. Dinner last night of course, was wahoo, with baked "french fried" potatoes and cucmber-tomato salad. Dried fruit medley and nuts were our (just) desert.

I have the camera out and went out on deck, but it was a calm night and there are no subjects for my photo study. That's all right as I suspect I will have plenty more shots at it between here and NZ. We are getting fairly far south. It's cool enough this morning to find me in a "T" shirt - I put one on for the first time in 10 days or so. Not quite a New England winter, but I am sure some one out there can feel my pain!

We are getting oh so close. 293 nm to go.

No comments: