Down to Decimals

99.9, 99.8, 99.7 etc miles to go. We finally are under 100 miles and it's nice to see the GPS change more quickly thanks to that decimal point. Now we don't have to wait quite as long to see some movement – we can watch in tenths of a nautical mile rather than whole miles.

Michael went for a swim in the Pacific yesterday to try to "de-aggregate" the FAD - Fish Aggregating Device, (aka Astarte's hull). The wind had just about died and the seas were the smallest we'd seen – so he decided to get in and check the prop, thru-hulls and hull. We dropped all sails, tied him on to a rope, and with scraper in hand he went in. Barbara was line handling and on shark watch. He got a good workout as there was enough wave and current to fight as he dove under the hull to check, scrape and de-barnacle the hull. He wanted to make sure the engine would get enough cooling water and that the prop was actually a propeller and not a ball of mussels and growth.

After 90 minutes, it was time to come in as he had probably started to attract enough attention of those oceanic sharks with all the noise and food supply he was sending into the current. That plus a few grunts and groans probably sounded like shark mating calls.

He may try to get the other side done today – or we'll just wait the day or so until we are at anchor for further cleaning. We had hoped that we would have an arrival today (Thursday), but it doesn't look like that will be the case. We had a very slow night with no wind at all – and now the wind has changed directions from the SE to NE and is still less than 10 knots – so that means slow, slow, slow. We should hopefully make it in by Friday afternoon. We started slow, its probably appropriate we'll end just as slow (but hopefully not going backwards).

35 days and counting.