Position: 34 degrees, 05 minutes south; 176 degrees, 45 minutes west (140 mile day)

Who would have thought that something so low tech would be so awesome! Ann bought one in NZ before we left and it’s been amazing. The Kiwis use them quite a bit, so it was easy to find one. It’s been such a nice addition to the cold night watches. You add some hot (but not scalding) water to the bottle and put it behind your back out in the cockpit. It stays warm for hours and if it gets really cold, you pull a wool blanket over the whole thing. Close your eyes and you’ll think you’re in a sauna at your favorite spa! The added benefit is that it’s cured my “tweaked” back. All the prep work, carrying heavy stuff like the dinghy engine, jerry jugs full of diesel, etc, etc left me with a pretty substantial lower back pain for about a week before we left. Two nights with the water bottle here on passage and I’m cured! Distance wise, 140 miles is worth celebrating, but 12 hours of that was motor sailing. The wind just died last night at 0200 and we need to keep our speed up to get above the low. Timing right now for that event is sometime Saturday midnight our time. For now, the wind filled in about 1400 from the west so we gybed and turned the engine off. Now it’s gone a bit southwest, I don’t think for too long, but it’s pushing us north, which is not too bad, but I’d like to get more easting in. We’re currently making about 50 degrees true. We’ll look at it in a few hours and see – maybe we’ll gybe back over for a while but while that would get us more east, we’d lost the northerly separation we need from the low. Everything out here requires a decision and is typically a compromise.

What I forgot to mention the other day is that we are getting our “sea legs” quite nicely. Neither of us felt seasick this time out and after the first day or two, we’re both sleeping really well, so at least on the physical side we’re good. And…we took baths today (Yay!). It was just barely warm enough for a cockpit shower with our friend the teapot.

For now, my day is kept fairly active around gathering weather faxes (tedious) and plotting the weather. We’re getting grib reports off the SSB and I have a weather router (Bob McDavitt) who is very well respected in these parts as a very experienced weather guru, giving us a second opinion. We stay connected via shipboard email, so I get an update from him every couple days. I’m looking forward to getting past this low so I can relax a bit and just enjoy the view!

Tonight’s supposed to get a bit blustery, so I put a double reef in at sunset, but right now the wind has died down. Did I say compromise?