Position: 28 degrees, 11 minutes south; 179 degrees, 24 minutes west

It’s dark in the woods, but off in the dense darkness beyond where you’re standing you hear a low, menacing growl and see the flash of white teeth. Then you hear movement, huge paws on the forest floor coming your way. You see another glint of white teeth, this time much closer, then all of a sudden the teeth shine right in your face and at the same time a deafening roar fills you head and you smell its hot breath on your cheek.

Yup, we had lightning last night and that’s what it feels like. I can deal with the squalls– wind, waves, rain – but the lightning is so random it scares me. You can never tell when a billion electron volt bolt of energy is going to find its way to the only thing rising above the surface for a thousand square miles. Your boat’s mast. 54 feet of aluminum. One of the flashes was right above our heads with the thunderclap rattling our teeth at the same time the flash blinded our vision for about 15 seconds.

So…when I saw the huge, black cloud with lightning inside it bearing down on us I decided the best way to “outrun” it was to sit still. We hove-to. I think it was the right thing to do since we were going the same way as the squall front. If we had run with it we would have been in it for a long time as it slowly passed us. On the other hand, sitting still meant it would run past us and we would spend a shorter amount of time exposed to the lightning. We ended up being in the lightning for about an hour – seemed much, much longer. We stayed hove-to about four hours to let the worst of the squall line go past and give me some much needed rest (Ann was off watch having been on earlier in the evening).

Turns out we have just “clipped” the corner of a subtropical depression that is just to the southeast of us. It’s quite a ways away, but throwing some nasty weather anyway. Most of today has been in continuing squalls with rain and 25-30 knot winds. The only good part is the wind is finally coming from the south so we have “turned the corner” and are now heading toward Fiji. The GRIBS are showing winds from the south at 15-20. Hopefully this system we’re in will moderate tonight and we’ll get the better weather. We expect about five more days for arrival maybe Sunday.

Also hopefully no more bears.