Position: 29 degrees, 53 minutes south; 167 degrees, 51 minutes west A 122 mile day.

Not a bad day’s run – an average of 5 knots. It started out pretty boisterous with evening, late night and early morning squalls with some blasting winds. We sailed all night with just the storm trys’l and storm jib. I added the regular jib this afternoon as the winds lightened.

The foulies are getting a break.

We’re in a place right now where the major force of the low has passed us and we’re now riding the remainder of the clockwise rotation – so the wind is still west quadrant. Right now, it’s SW and tonight it’s looking to shift west and then NW which would be nice since we want to stay right around the 30 degree latitude line Right now the SW wind is pushing us northwest a bit. We want to go about 90 degrees, but we’re actually going about 60 degrees. If we go higher we risk very light winds, even easterlies as there is a high above us filling in. Below the 30 degree line we can hold 15-20 knots of westerlies at least until the end of the week. If the wind doesn’t change tonight we’ll jibe in the morning and head southeast. At that point it looks like there’s a new low behind us that we’ll have to deal with. It’s just now forming above New Zealand, so too early to tell how strong it will get or exactly the path. So we plan. As far as tonight, even though the wind is getting light – in the mid-teens, we’re going to give ourselves a break and stay with this sail combo and not put the main up until tomorrow. The past week has been a lot of work and we deserve the night off from lots of sail adjustments. I think it’s going to be squally anyway, so right around midnight I’ll probably be very glad we don’t have the main up.

Along with the wind easing, we had blue skies and very large, majestic waves rolling us along. It actually was a gorgeous sailing day. Let’s see; we want to go east, the wind is pushing us east, it was a nice day. Hmm, I guess I can’t complain too much.

The other event of the day was another albatross sighting. These are just incredible sights to see. They are huge, with 80 something inch wingspans and are most graceful. There is a colony that we visited near Dunedin on the South Island and they told us there that the juveniles, upon leaving the nest go out do not touch land for two years!

Trivia for today – our weather guru in NZ emailed that the low that we were in the last couple days was just described on NZ TV as “The biggest on the planet”. It sure felt like that to us.