Postion: 22 degrees, 09 minutes south; 177 degrees 33 minutes east

Finally getting a little nice sailing

This kind of weather is why we keep coming back

Half way there and we're still friends!

From Ann: Last night turned out to be a glorious night for a sail. The moon still looked full as it played peek-a-boo through the clouds. We haven’t seen the moon since it was full. It’s nice to get the benefit of the moonlight and to enjoy the twinkling stars. I never get tired of moonlight sailing. The only downside of last night’s watch was the exhaustion left over from the prior night’s great adventures. Lisa and I were bound and determined to give Capt’n Bob a well-deserved six hours of uninterrupted sleep and as the watch started it looked like it would be a piece of cake. That was at 9 pm. At 10 pm Lisa and Ann are having a conversation to help stay awake. This is how it went. Lisa: “So Ann, how many quilts do you think you have made?” (good start Lisa, we all know Ann can talk about quilts for hours) Ann: “Probably about 200” ….. (and off she goes. Until Ann realizes she is putting even herself to sleep and so she stops.) Lisa: “I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open”. Ann: “Me too!” (Note that we have a little less than five hours to go on this watch.) Ann: “How about we take turns napping. Go ahead and close your eyes. I will wake you in 30 minutes.” Success. Lisa snoozes. Ann stargazes for the next half hour. Then we swapped. When Lisa woke me after 30 minutes it was from a deep sleep! But it felt great. And turns out that 30 minutes was all I needed. Well almost. Enter Angry Birds to entertain Ann. Suffice it to say that I was able to finish our watch AND many levels of Angry Birds without waking Lisa. Well-deserved sleep. And today has been beautiful and sunny. The water is the deep blue that our friends on Eagle’s Wings promised. But the wind is blowing 25-30 knots from behind us which makes Charisma surf down the 2.5 meter waves. Picture a five year old boy pretending to be an airplane with his arms extended. He zooms across the ground with his arms dipping up and down to catch the good air currents. That’s what it feels like on Charisma today. And in a boat built like Charisma that means rolling from rail to rail in the water. When Charisma rolls like this the crew gets their daily calisthenics. The best ab workout around! Workouts are everywhere on a boat. Capt’n Bob gets a great one with every sail change as he hoists the sails. We, the crew, work our arm muscles with every crank of the winch and pull of a sheet. And then there is the balancing needed to move about a cabin in these rolly conditions. You can imagine the skill it takes to perform bucket brigade duties without spills. We are definitely getting into shape. In fact we think we have each lost at least a stone (that’s for our fans at Riddlesden!).

We have just dropped the main and put up the storm trysail with the jib. The wind is gusting well into the 30’s and it’s just more comfortable with the smaller sails and we’re still doing up to 9 knots. It seems to have settled the rolling a bit. Good for Charisma time.