Midday report Feb 6th
Thanks Noomeister
I managed to download a grib file sent to me by sailmail, seems like a lot of NE winds. We have been running on one engine since about 4am when the wind died. Now its 1pm and there is about a 7-10knot NE tail wind (which confirms your current prediction exactly) so i have one engine going and the headsail clewed out (but no mainsail). We are doing 4-5knots still heading directly for Galapagos. Our 1st 24hr run yielded 133miles...average of just under 7 knots...not too bad as most of it is in on a crappy dead run. We have a similar confused following sea identical to what we had coming through the windward passage when you were on board...which makes it quite uncomfortable but not too bad...our apparent wind on board is almost zero so its HOT and muggy. Caught a beautiful big sailfish on the handline this morning at about 8am which I released in text book fashion after a few pics. It was about 3,5m long and we unknowingly towed it behind shimmi for about 20 minutes before noticing. Andy did a great 12-4am watch, then slept like the dead until 11am...he is feeling much better. Chantal did the 4am to 8am, on her watch the nice sw wind we had for most of the night died. The kiddies are all good, life consists of puppet shows (2 old socks), dinosaur circus, plenty of colouring in, and paying special attention to the wildlife of our next stop. Josh gets very upset if I confuse a turtle with a tortoise. Josh and i also painted the sailfish as it presented us with an opportunistic diversion from regular shimmi school. Josh says he is glad that the sailfish went back to his wife...'but what did he say when he got back?' Stuck to the side of the sailfish was a beautiful opaque remora. We are in a different universe now. Just blue all around. No land or another ship in sight. A marlin spontaneously tail walks about 200m of the port bow then slams down...then repeats this sequence another 4 times before all is quiet again. Hopefully this kuk sea state will improve as the NE winds up north run out of steam. It seems like we will be doing plenty motoring so I am going to have to do some fuel consumption calculations to make sure that we make it to Galapagos...
Lekker!
Gol
