Position: 29 degrees, 05 minutes south; 173 degrees, 33 minutes east (119 NM today)

It turned cold last night and is turning seriously cold tonight as the south winds are bring arctic air this way. Last night’s attire included breaking out the thermal underwear, jackets, long pants, neck gaiters and wool caps. Tonight will be that and more. The wool blanket was deployed as well. Can gloves be far behind?

Today has been a little frustrating from a sailing point of view. We have a strong south wind, which is nice since we can sail instead of motor, but it forces us further west than we want to go. We’re heading about 210 degrees magnetic, but our course direct Opua is 166 degrees magnetic. We’re just at that place where we can’t tack over to the other direction because we would be going away from Opua, but this direction takes us west. Arghhh! Hopefully the grib I pulled last night is right in that it shows the wind changing from south up to east over the next couple days which will allow us to angle in. We’ll see. The weather is very unsettled so I don’t really trust the gribs, but they are agreeing with what we hear on the radio, so cross fingers.

One especially fun part of this trip has been the serendipitous buddy boating with Don and Deb on Buena Vista. Turned out we left about the same time and have actually been within VHF radio range almost the whole way (that would be about 10-12 miles since our VHF is weak). We set up a schedule and chat three or four times a day. A couple days ago we crossed close enough to take pictures of each other’s boat.

And I can’t finish this until I mention John and Lisa’s prepared food again. We had John’s spaghetti sauce last night. Absolutely the best there is and we were loving it. We ate the second and last of Lisa’s curried chicken in coconut milk this evening. Oh, we are going to miss that now that it’s gone. Spectacular! Thanks guys, the conditions on this trip have made cooking really difficult, but having these vacuum-packed meals has been a life saver.

And…I can’t sign off tonight without saying what a gorgeous (full) moonrise we are seeing right now. Most of these nights, we have had clouds, so now that it’s full, it’s nice to see a brilliant white moon rising above the sea throwing it’s powerful searchlight our way over the water. Stunning and dramatic.