Position:24 degrees, 44 minutes south; 174 degrees, 42 minutes east. 117 miles in the last 24 hours.

After three days of strong, blustery winds and bumpy seas yesterday lightened up and last night/early morning the wind came down significantly. That means everything about sails, trim and steering had to be adjusted.

First, the double reef on the main came out. One reef at 0300 and the second at 0400. Once that’s done, all three sails have to be re-trimmed. Once re-trimmed for light air there’s less force so you have to adjust Wilson the wind vane for less weather helm. Once this is done you go back to the sails and fine tune them for balance. Then you sit and watch for 5 minutes or so and see how the boat’s responding with all the changes. Trim a bit more and watch some more, then likely a final fine trim and off she goes happy to still be making five knots or so with the lower wind strength. Also the wind has gone aft of the beam a bit so we’re sailing flatter and the seas have come down by half. And the stars are out.

All in all, a pretty nice ride.

At 0430 while doing the final retrimming session, I went below to make some tea. Two minutes and the flame went out. Propane’s out. Good thing we filled the other one in Fiji. Turns out two 20 pound tanks have lasted us five months. So, I headed out to the cockpit tank locker with a wrench to change the tanks. Thank goodness it waited until today to run out. This would have been an ugly job yesterday with the wind and waves.

At this point we’re coming into the middle part of the voyage. This is the part where we’re going to see a lot of wind changes as the weather systems come across the Tasman Sea. Already today the wind shifted around to the north (it’s been south trending to east since leaving Fiji) and gone really light at about 7 knots. I jibed mid-day and we’re now on starboard tack and heading about 210 True making 2.5 to 3 knots. The weather forecast has the wind shifting into the south and increasing to 10-20 knots in the next 24 hours so we’ll again have a pretty major change. Our choices are going to get interesting as we try and position ourselves for the final push into New Zealand. Too far to the west and we waste time going too far out of our way. Too far east and we get headwinds the final days. It all depends what the final weather system looks like as we approach.