Day 11: Still Sailing

07* 05.4' North
125* 45.3 West

Here we are still sailing. The winds have not shut off for us yet, so we keep making southing towards the Marquesas under sail (that's less diesel that we have have to buy in French Polynesia at their astronomical prices). We just need to be able to get to Tahiti where we have a fuel purchasing waiver waiting for us. Anyway, that's a whole other blog post. The wind stayed so constant last night that Brad and Tim made the call to keep the spinnaker (yes, like a race boat) all night. We only hit one squall and it wasn't too bad. There was a pretty good one bearing down on us this morning, but we held our course and it sort of petered out and passed behind us while Brad was on the SSB running the daily net.
That brings me to our newest news. During the net, the SSB started acting funny and basically wasn't working. Brad has looked at it and is hoping that with all the transmitting that he was doing as net controller, that something overheated and caused the problem. He was able to send and receive email after letting the contraption sit for awhile. So......if blog posts and email from us stop, you know that it could just be our radio acting up again.
Along the same vein, our shore side support crew has let us know that the SPOTs are no longer coming through. We will keep sending in hopes that the device can pick up a satellite as we get closer to the islands. Again, if you have strong feelings about the hole out here, let them know at http://www.findmespot.com/ .
Otherwise, we are all well and excited about becoming shellbacks!