Oh my goodness, we had a great day.  We finally got the trade winds, through up the spinnaker and experienced the type of day that everyone told us about.  This is how the crossing is supposed to be, this is sailing!  My spirits have lifted just because the winds shifted.  There was no engine noise, no generator, water maker or washer machine – just the wind in our sails and the sea under our boat – perfect.  To top it off there was a gorgeous rainbow off the port side of the boat at the horizon – it’s like Mother Nature is telling us to have a great day.  We averaged about 20+ knots of wind, 10-12 knots of boat speed and great VMG.  We averaged about 30 miles per shift and hit a 200+ mile day.  Not many boats or sailors can say that they sailed a 200 mile day and we did it – thank God!

After 14 days of not being on my crack berry, phone or computer I finally decided to try to send an email to my family and friends as I was certain they wanted to hear from me.  During my shift, when the boat was floating across the waters, I climbed onto the noisy navigation chair and tried to type.  First it was weird trying to remember where the keys were on the key board, and then I had to adjust my stance to accommodate the shifting of the boat as that shifts the keyboard.  Once I got into a rhythm it flowed and it felt amazing. It was good to share my thoughts and feelings, but probably not so good to be as honest as I was for the first communication.   After that I got productive online as there were a lot of things that I needed to do too: cancel cookie baking day, extend the day care for our home and fish care, alert my work of our delay and make sure some tasks were completed, and reschedule all of our flights.  Once I got that all done I went back to my shift to enjoy the spinnaker sail.  It is part of my personality; I like the check list and today was a good day to √ things off the to-do list!

Its been 2 weeks and we still have fresh fruit on board. Not much left at the moment, a couple oranges and grapefruit. I’ll be gone tomorrow, if not tonight on watch.

Christine got all excited and made breakfast. Old fashioned Flap-Jacks, not the bisquik you are used to, but Flap Jacks. There is a difference, the marketing materials on the Flap Jack box certainly said so. We did forget syrup at the store so, honey and marmalade worked perfectly to top the top notch flap jacks!

The wind is clocking around behind us this morning, so it was light air, 10kt, and almost holding steady @ 120 degrees behind us. We tried to fly the Asymmetrical spinnaker, the A-Kite. It takes about 15 mins to get all hooked up and ready to hoist. Raised it up, and it filled up just fine behind the full main sail. Couple of tweaks and we were floating along, then as expected the big kite scared the wind away, and it dropped to 5kt. So another 20 mins to pack it all backup and wait for more consistent wind.

Spectacular day, really flat ocean, cool breeze, not too humid. Aired out the boat by opening the almost all the hatches, and motor sailed along to keep the 5kt toward the destination and promise of trade winds.

Since an engine was running, 2 loads of laundry were done, water tanks topped off (this time the washing didn’t use all the water, we used the delicate setting, not the full on presoak, cycle). The place looked like a double wide trailer park on laundry day with all the laundry clipped to anything that would get sun to air dry the threads.

Christine also took inventory of all the gear on board, and where it is. She organized a few things and separated some that needs to be separated from the boat as well.

Somewhere today we crossed the 1/2 way point or are about to, I haven’t measured it. We celebrated a good day with a few rum n diets to get inspiration for dinner. Course a vodka sprite for Mrs. Christine.

Z-Tejas has nothing on our fish tacos. Fresh tempura Dorado, Fresh home made salsa complete with cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, onions, the whole works. Yummy, Yummy!

Drug lines, but we were really moving too slow to attract the big fish – or at least that is today’s excuse.

Wind has come around to the stern, and we are cruising along, with hopes of a spinnaker run in the morning. We have heard that the ARC boats just a bit south of us are pulling in 10kt boat speeds so hopefully we’ll get some of that tomorrow too, sort of heading a little south to try to hurry that up.

We are also going to try an SSB call with Ron’s buddy on the west coast tuesday @ 0200z and test out this SSB for voice calls, as we haven’t had much luck finding the ARC frequency.

We are thinking we’ll be at least a week late back to work, we’ll start to work on rescheduling our airfare tomorrow.

Crew is well rested and looking forward to the 2nd half of the journey, and of course getting there.

Course over ground: 235 Speed over ground: 5.2 kn Total miles through water: 266 (got reset) Miles to destination: 1363 kn (as a crow).

We are officially ½ way across the Atlantic ocean today, so I made Flap jacks to celebrate.  As I made Mickey Mouse pancakes for the boys they read the history of a flap jack which was an interesting story, really!  Today was beautiful, warm and fairly calm. It was a great day to be on the water, but a bad day for sailing with a goal toward your destination.  However, this made it a perfect day to get a big chunk of the inventory done. I started on the starboard side as I can clean it out and put “un-essential” items in one place (for quick unloading once at St Lucia).  I attacked all starboard storage areas including the cabinets, floor board storage, head and under the bed storage – it was a huge undertaking, but a good work day.  I removed everything from the area, determined if usefulness, sorted it.  If it made the “keep” pile, it was cleaned. Once everything was removed, I cleaned the storage area and returned the clean, keep items and inventoried the area.   After working on the starboard side, I started working on the galley (not the salon seating storage areas as that is its own task).  It was hard to really get through the galley area when there is so much food. I don’t want to discard anything including the expired food for fear that we might need to eat it – guess I will need to do that when we get ashore.  I did inventory the plate ware, glass ware, utensils, pots, pans, baking items, etc…when we get ashore I will have to take everything out, sort, clean, inventory and place in storage areas that make more sense to us.

In addition to all of my cleaning and inventory work, I managed to get 2 more loads of laundry done so we all have clean clothes.  This time we only used ¼ tank for 2 loads, much better on the delicate cycle.  I know it sounds like a no brainer, but having the low suds laundry detergent is great – but it just doesn’t smell as nice as my Tide Lavender from home.   We toasted our ½ way mark with rum, vodka and gin (not mixed together silly, the boys had rum and diet; I had vodka sprite and Marvin and gin).  I thought the vodka would help me sleep but unfortunately it eluded me most of the night.  Between the pounding of the boat, the light from the navigation station and the squeaking of the navigation chair I got about 3 hours of sleep – made for a tough shift.  We were heading in the wrong direction with full sails up and 23 knots of wind.  So, I woke Matt up to help me jibe the boat.  We did and lost all boat speed so we tacked back but took a different angle.  He headed back to bed so I could finish my shift. By the time my replacement came up, an hour late because he overslept, I crashed and slept hard.