With dinner and the nightly roll call done, we came up the companionway ladder to find ourselves face-to-face with a blue footed booby sitting on the dodger right above our heads. He was very unconcerned that we were on his boat. As the evening progressed we also gained one on the bow pulpit and one on the lifelines about midship. They all stayed until morning. Alas, my booby deterrent system had one flaw: the boobies snuck in when I wasn’t looking.

At this point, completely outnumbered by boobies, I decided Charisma will now become an international wildlife sanctuary dedicated to the preservation of boobies. I will be applying for grant money. We will also be marketing Blue Footed Booby Guano. Known to be an aphrodisiac by New Guinea tribesmen (who know about these things), I’m sure it will do well. Limited quantities will be available for this coming holiday season, so get your orders in soon.

2200 start of the evening watch. We finally have some wind after two days of very light air. It’s veered around behind us and we’re now broad-reaching at about 7 knots, sliding down wave after wave. Nice breeze, full moon behind us; I just had a funny fantasy moment. I was watching the water go by as I often do sailing back to Berkeley at the end of the day and was thinking; “someday it will be like this sailing to the South Pacific”. Hey!! Wait a minute… Hard to believe we’re really out here doing this.

0800. I’m having fun with the General Ham license. The Ham bands are so much clearer than the SSB. The reception is great. I just finished a morning net I call into called Picante Net. It’s run very informally by the guys in Puerto Vallarta who also ran the Ham tests. Check in is between 0600 and 0700. This morning I was talking with them 500 miles to the East and also talking with one of the other boats who left a month ago, has made the Marquesas and is on their way to Tahiti. They are over 2000 miles to the East of us and South of the equator. Amazing you can do this with a radio from a relatively small boat and with not much power.

So….Message to Jon Eberly; Jon, if you can get on Picante Net some morning, it would be fun to see if we can span from here to San Francisco. Picante Net is on 6.212.0 MhZ at 1200 Zulu every morning except Sunday. I usually check in around 1245Z and catch the tail end of the net. Very informal and they know me as “Charisma” (they don’t do call signs. Funny for a bunch of guys who run Ham licensing). Drop me an email if you think you might be on and I’ll be sure to listen for you (or let me know if there’s an alternate time/freq you might be able to get on).

So, mostly that’s it for today. By the way, we’re now very solidly in the tradewinds. We even set the pole this morning after Ann got up. We’re now wing on wing and nicely sliding down the waves almost DDW with Wilson doing a Fabulous job of steering, making a course of 220 down the rhumb line toward Hiva Oa. We should start seeing some days in the 120+ mile range at this point. I’m starting to plan our crossing through the ITCZ, so spent a few hours this morning getting weather faxes to start plotting where the Zone is and where we might want to “cut through” to avoid the worst of the convection.

Stay Tuned