Position: 27 degrees, 12 minutes south; 178 degrees, 16 minutes east

Today was a slice of heaven. Sitting in the cockpit enjoying one of my favorite lunches. I finally made the meatloaf right, so the leftovers made perfect sandwiches. Ann made some of her great pressure cooker bread and I had a Maka-which is a Tongan beer. Yes, life was especially good today on Charisma. Last night and most of today were pretty nice sailing although the wind was up and down, so I had to make a lot of sail adjustments. One especially happy note was that we had light enough wind this morning that we could take down the big jib and put up the yankee. I should have done that in Tonga but I was thinking of the light air we might sail through not the heavy air. The reality though is that big jib really reduced our options in heavy air. I’m so happy to have it down and packed away-especially now that it’s so windy.

The last couple days have been nice, but we’re paying for it now. Late in the day we sailed through a squall line and what did we find on the other side? 25 knots of wind and two meter seas. It has gotten snarly out. We’re down to a double reefed main and just the stays’l and doing 6 knots close reaching toward Kiwi Land. The next step to reduce sail will be dropping the main and going with the storm trysail. Probably around 30 knots of wind or so. Getting to New Zealand means four days of this and the bonus is that sometime, probably on Friday (which for those in the US will be Thursday) we’re likely to see a gale. Winds in the 40 knot range. We’ll see. We can always hope that we’ll get far enough south to avoid that. Knowing we have some rough weather ahead, I made a green curry eggplant dish with rice today and put it in the fridge. All we have to do for a hot meal is heat it. So, if it’s stormy, we’ll have an easy hot meal with no prep.

That’s our report from the “other” side of the international date line.