Saturday, May 17, 2014

May 17 Position Report

5/17/14 Wandering Dolphin POS
GMT 1200
10 19.43N.  105 32.58W
COG 300T
SOG 7-8 kts
NTN 142 nautical miles
DTG 3177 nautical miles

Wind: E 18-20
Current: 1.5 to 2 kts favorable
Temp: 89.2f
Pressure: 29.5
Sky: mostly cloudy with squalls
Seas: 4-6 ft east swells

Good Morning,

Yesterday started with no wind, wallowing back and forth.  I motored north for two hours, charging the batteries and then the wind started to fill in.  By the end of the day we were sailing at 6-7 knots to the WNW with reefed sails in 20 knots of east wind.  That has continued throughout the night.  We are now up in the belt where we can expect this wind for at least the next couple of days.  We have decided to skip Clipperton.  The possibility of Tropical development has us spooked and we would just as soon get as far away from the "hot zone" as we can, as fast as we can.  The low developing just behind us is forecast to be on top of Clipperton about the same time we would get there too.  It would have been cool to see a place where humans don't actually live but the unanimous vote on WD is to keep moving and get to Hawaii.

We have had some trouble with our Delorme InReach.  It got to the point where we had to pair it with the iPad every time we wanted to send a message to our Facebook page.  We accidentally deleted the link in it to our page when we were trying to get it to clear an unsent message and now we can't remember the link we have to put in the message bar to get it to post.  We are trying to sort it out. If we can't we will send this morning post and Beck will send one in our evening email check so there will be two posts everyday from email.

Yesterday we had oatmeal with pecans, brown sugar and cinnamon for breakfast, Ramen noodles with the broth for lunch, and spaghetti noodles with butter, Parmesan, garlic, sweet Italian sausage and olive oil for supper.  That is the end of our fresh meat, the rest of the trip will be canned stuff.  Yay...  We have about 8 onions, 10 potatoes, and two cabbage left in our fresh veggie hammocks. We have been taking multi vitamin and vitamin C gummy bears every day so hopefully that will keep us healthy.
With no sun and light wind it has been a challenge to keep the batteries topped off but now that the wind is blowing harder the wind gen has taken up some of the slack.  I shouldn't have to run the engine for charge today.  Running downwind decreases the efficiency of the wind gen because it subtracts the boat speed from the wind speed turning the gen.  But it has been steady enough that we are getting an ok charge through the night.  Until the charge is high we turn off the fridge at night and are restricted in our watermaking ability.  We have caught enough fresh rain water to keep up though and if we can get another good dump during the day I can go up on deck and open the fill hole and maybe top the tanks off again.

The boat has been doing very well.  The other night we lost the very top batten out of the batten pocket when the boat was wallowing and the sail was flogging.  I have an extra batten that I can cut down to size and put in the pocket when we get a calmer day again.  It doesn't make any difference in sail shape right now anyway since we are running down wind on a broad reach.
Sorry this mornings' blog is all business we'll make the evening one more of a family blog.
Sailing!
Captain Tofer, Rebecca, EmilyAnne, Kanyon, Kaleb, and Benny

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