Night watches on the gulf of Mexico have you watching out for shrimp boats, work boats heading to the rigs, and of course the rigs themselves. This trip, its been about enjoying the stars, looking for the occasional commercial or sailboat out on the horizon or just keeping the boat heading the correct direction and adjusting the sails. Mostly its poking Auto, when there is a wind shift.

Awesome day, woke up a little upset about the miles under the keel since the engines were turned off and late raising of the full sail. After that we have been kicking it all day motor sailing, with one engine at 1400 rpm, just to push us over the wave when the wind dies.

Ham and cheese omelets for breakfast, and just chilled out most of the day as we sailed onward.

After lunch snack quesidilla, motivation got the better of us. Christine had been wanting to do a load of laundry, and with a beautiful sunny day. We tried the washing machine. I worked but sucked out fresh water tank on the starboard side dry as a bone. Doh! Note to self, use the ‘short’ cycle when making your own water, took the better part of the day to replenish the water supply with the watermaker. But all back in business now.

We have been dragging fishing lines behind the boat for thousands of miles with only one Bonita to show for it. That all changed today. First Ron hooked a sweet Dorado (Mahi Mahi) right after I had changed from a small lure to a large one, Doh! I watched him filet up that puppy, now in the freezer. A while later, I hooked another Dorado, a bit bigger I might add, and I cleaned and made steaks from this guy. Guess what we had for dinner. Awesome Mahi Mahi over rice and green beans.

Captain Ron cooked up the delicious meal while I put the Lazy Jacks back together. Christine even really enjoyed the fresh MahiMahi going back for seconds.

I’m starting to think that if Jack wasn’t so lazy Matt wouldn’t have to work to fix them. They really need to be re-done right, instead of scraps of line that are there now.

Another beautiful night tonight, no clouds, lots of stars, almost warm enough to leave the jacket inside. The winds are shifting north, so we are not on the nose. Right now our course has a 30 degree fluctuation between 250 and 280, every so often, with 275 being the direction to the destination. Winds are light at 8-10kt, but with the iron genny (engine) filling in, we are still getting 6kt to the destination. Minimal waves so the sleeping is good.

Crew is still doing well, ready to make better time. Optimistic that the forecast holds and we can fly a spinnaker soon, and at least are doing better than 30 miles we got a few days ago. Out best guess is that we’ll be a week later than planned but that’s still an early guess, we’ll be trying to come up with a plan in a couple of days as what to do about the airfare and tickets during busy season.

Course over ground: 256 Speed over ground: 5.3kn Total miles through water: ugh, reset again,now says 102 Miles to destination: 1508 kn if we were a bird.

I can’t tell you how irritating it is to wake up to 1-2 knots of boat speed.  This is not the first time it has happened and it is more aggravating than you can imagine.  It appears that not all of our crew members are on the same page as to the goal of this trip – deliver the boat as safely and quickly as possible.  Matt has had to have a chat with the crew to ensure that we stay on course hit the best VMG as possible and keep the boat speed up as much as the boat can safely handle without beating up the crew.  It is hard to believe that we have been at sea for 12 days and are ½ way through our fuel and food and are only ½ way across the Atlantic.

We ran the water maker to fill up our water tanks again today (I love the water maker).  However, the water from the water maker is supposed to taste like regular water, but it tastes salty which means the water maker was not de-pickled properly during the first part of the crossing and/or something is wrong with one of the filers – Matt will have to fix it when we get to St Lucia – for now we will have to deal with salty water L.

I was able to convince the boys that we need to run the washer machine as we had worn and re-worn the same clothes for almost 2 weeks.  Of course I did not want to listen to the directions given to me and I ran the machine on “normal” load which sucked all the water out of one of the tanks – lesson learned.  We will re-fill the tanks and try another load tomorrow.  Even though this is a washer/dryer we decided not to use the dryer to preserve the batteries.  So, we decorated the boat with our clean laundry and managed to pull off the ‘white trash” look pretty well.

Ron cooked a wonderful dinner using part of the fish that they caught – I loved it.  Yes, you read that right, little miss non-fish eating girl loved the fresh fish dinner.

We ended up running one engine and averaged 100 miles today (our goal is 150 per day).

Beautiful day, huge rolling waves, what you might picture the middle of the ocean like.

Raised the main sail to 3rd reef position, we did have 25+kt of wind (oh and the mess with the flag and lazy jacks wouldn’t let us raise anymore sail either, but didn’t need any more sail either. Shut down one of the engines and motor sailed up and down the 15 foot swells. Tried without the engine but speed dropped too much to make it over the swells.

Tried some cereal for breakfast, special K was alright, but hardly filling. So around lunch (shortly after breakfast) made a couple of wraps that the crew split along with a cheese platter with some yummy white cheddar.

Sit back and let the boat go. Staring up every so often to see how the heck, I was gonna solve the mess above, in 25kn of wind and 15 foot seas. Nothing sounded safe or pleasant, about being tossed around on a string 35 feet above the water.

All day thinking of how to get up there safely, finally the winds were dropping into the 20s and high teens, so we were going to need more canvas. The courage had grown to a necessity. So we dropped the main, ran a safety line through the tack of the main (top of the sail) and hoisted the main back up to its reefed position. The safety line would be the guide to keep me close to the mast and not swinging wildly while being hoisted up on a spinnaker halyard. Probably took 30-45 mins to sort out the details while up there with one hand holding on for dear life as the boat rolled over the waves and the mast exaggerating every wave. I was able to untangle the flag and lazy jack, tie a new “D” ring in to the lazy jack and run a small line through the “D” ring to fix the lazy jacks from the deck – most likely tomorrow.

Christine said the winds went back to 22kt while I was up there, and the 15foot waves were a very good reason to hold on tightly. So if you are counting thats 3 times up the mast on this adventure so far, and of course more bruises were generated this time too!

So for dinner we were sailing sans engines, nice pasta with garlic chicken, and garlic bread. Fresh fruit is on its last few days, only a couple of oranges and apples left. Freezer is still stocked full with protein, lots of pasta and dried foods on board. Had to clean out some of the cilantro from the fridge as it was going bad, but fridge is still full of cheese and produce. The green tomatoes we bought ripened within 2 days, so they too are in the fridge.

Planned on sailing through the night, but when I woke for my shift 6hrs later we hadn’t made any miles toward the destination. I really should raise the rest of the main and keep on without an engine, but I’m lazy and its dark outside. We’ll raise it in the AM and see if we can get 7kt of boat speed from the 10kn of wind, but I doubt it.

Forecast matches the conditions still, so hopefully within 24hrs we’ll start to see the winds shift into a favorable direction and we can start knocking off some miles again.

Crew is good, all seem well rested tho lots of silence when book reading or just chilling out enjoying being but a small speck on a large ocean. Haven’t seen another vessel in 30+ hrs.

Course over ground: 237 Speed over ground: 4.9kn Total miles through water: 779 +650 = 1429 Miles to destination: 1628 kn if we were a bird.