The final leg, again…

Yesterday was a quiet day in many respects – we continued to proceed west allowing the transition zone south of us to continue to fill in. After a few days of heavy overcast and pitch black nights we welcomed back a brilliant heaven with stars and planets. Yesterday morning the sliver of a new moon was visible just before the sunrise – beautiful!

NOTE: If you think you have seen and heard this all before, you are probably right. I was fixing something, then forgot to return to my own login, so in my post this morning I was masquerading as Sharon. I am reposting this to ensure people do not think Sharon always talks about herself in the 3rd person (although that is often the case). Also, we are not doing this leg of the journey again/twice 🙂

We managed to get in another shower with the water tank on port side “full”. As we may have mentioned before the “baffles” which keep the water from sloshing around in the tanks had started to rot/decay and Bill had managed to fix the ones in the starboard tank (drinking, cooking water), but like many things on a boat, the port side were just impossible to get at. As a result that tank has been used for the electric toilet on the port side.

Today we will start to use the water maker to fill the starboard tank, but there was a small residual concern if the membrane was “biologically clean”, and the seas have been too bumpy to mess with it. If there was a problem we decided it was a bad plan to have all 3 of us out with Montezuma’s revenge at the same time. We all “tasted the water” and were happy with the taste test, then Sharon volunteered/drew the short straw and and made herself a nice glass of ice tea with the water from the maker water last night after dinner.

The good news is there were no surprise trips to the heads, and she is sitting in her favourite place in the sun reading her book. We did check if there were laws against biological testing on human subject, but water makers did not appear on any restricted lists.

About 6:30am this morning we changed course and started back southerly. We are now on the final run for Hiva Oa. Our timing was great as a couple hours latter two big storms passed by to the north of us.

We are about 2,100nm from departure and another 950nm to our first destination – Hiva Oa. There are a few places in this final leg where winds may be too light (two models show one day of motoring, two show three hours and two show that we sail all the way), but however we look at it, the zone is filling in nicely with some nice winds.

It’s a beautiful sunny 26C with great winds, relatively calm seas and I am being well fed. What more is there to ask for!