Day 3.......Motoring already!

August 13, 2010 (Friday the 13th)
12:56 HST (22:56 UTC)
Lat 29 25.3  North
Lon 157 10.7  West

Yup, we are motoring. Since the last blog entry, the wind has slowly tapered off, until it reached a low of about 5 knots this morning. After looking at the weather models(I talk more about this in a bit), we decided to crank up the Iron Genoa and do some motoring.

For dinner yesterday, Randy fried the Mahi Mahi with a light breading on the outside. This was served with a green salad and diced up potatoes. Yum! After dinner we watched a movie, "Children of Men". Very intense! Brad popped some popcorn. The watch schedule started right after the movie finished, with Randy  and Dave on first, I hit the sack. My watch was to be the 4:30am to 7am stretch so I had a full 7.5 hours of sleep. Nice!

By far the highlight of the last 24 hours was standing the night watch. I believe all aboard would agree with that statement. Last night was the peak of the Percied Meteor Shower.  Well, let’s put it this way: If you want to watch the stars with absolutely no light pollution, the middle of the Pacific on a clear night is a pretty darn good place to do it. I had only about a half an hour to watch the show before things got too light with the coming sunrise. I lost count at 30 meteors after only 10 minutes of watching. It was spectacular.

With the lighter wind and seas, things have definitely become more civilized. Everyone aboard the boat has had a shower except yours truly. I believe there will be a mutiny aboard if I don't follow suit,  seeing as we are all sleeping in each other’s bunks.

The weather........well, the short story is it doesn't look good for a short trip. The Pacific High is in the process of being split in two by a front and a low coming from the west. This weather system is forecast to dissipate.  As it does, the high will re-establish itself. This all will happen right in the path of where we want to go! Bottom line is a lot of light air and possible head winds. We have decided to motor NNE to try and hook into some of the wind generated by the front and low. I fear that we will not be able to get north fast enough to take advantage of this, but we are going to give it a try. We need to be able to sail another two or three days if we hope to pull off my master plan. What is the master plan you may ask?  Well, I want to motor right through the center of the Pacific High and hopefully have a enough fuel to come out the other side and catch NW winds for the sail to the Strait of Juan De Fuca. We have enough fuel to motor for about 7.5 days, maybe a bit more if we keep the RPMs down. That means we need to do some more sailing before doing the long motor or I don't believe we'll have the fuel to pull it off. The models are having a hard time figuring out what is going to happen in our neck of the woods weather wise, so I'm hoping there will be periods of good wind for sailing. I know it's Friday the 13th, so please knock on wood for us or do any other ritual you think may send us luck.

Capt. Brad signing off.

PS We caught another Mahi Mahi today so fish is still on the menu.