Wind Woes

When we are anchorage and want calm winds – we get 20 plus knots. Now we are on a 550 mile passage from Suwarrow in the Cook Islands to Niue, and we have less than 8 knots. We are a toy boat in the big Pacific tub and someone is just splashing away, rolling us around but not pushing us forward! The last 24 hours we have barely gone two knots. The sails are just slatting about. At one point last night, the banging sails got to be too much and we just pulled them in and drifted with a very small sliver of headsail poled out.

The forecast has a convergence coming though and unfortunately we may get the other extreme starting tomorrow. The skies are clouding up now and perhaps it's the start of more squally, stormy weather. Of course the forecast before we left had given us the hopeful news of a nice 15 to 18 knot breeze out of the ESE – perfect for a nice reach to Niue. Haven't seen that...but at least last night we had no squalls.

So we roll around and listen to the boat creak and groan as we rock back and forth in the seas. When we move forward the roll is less uncomfortable – and the boat seems less creaky. It's hard to cook or take on projects when you're rolling this much. So the days are spent listening to the morning and evening radio net, reading, getting a log entry done every so often and looking for whales. Because we caught that giant mahi – we aren't even fishing (though we are going so slow, it's rather doubtful we'd be catching). We eat a big meal at noonish and graze the rest of the meals.

Thanks for the "Isaac" updates. We appreciate all the news – it keeps us entertained on passages.

We continue to plod along...