I can’t believe how well I am sleeping on this little passage. I drop off within 15 minutes of going to bed and sleep until Mike wakes me, which today is 6 hours later, two hours more sleep than he should have given me. Bliss! It makes so much difference to how I feel. The fact that the boat is much quieter – ie not so much wave slapping noise – is a great help.
We get some wind in the early morning and pull away from Dreamcatcher quite dramatically. Then Samantha has one of her blackouts which I discover when I am suddenly aware that the sails are flapping wildly - when I look at the dials we are nearly 80 degrees off course but i manage to get her back on track without having to turn the engine back on. Then half an hour later, I inadvertently turn off the navigation instruments instead of the navigation lights, realise my mistake straight away and turn them back on but don’t realise that the consequence of this is that Samantha flips out for a second time. Again I manage to get her back on course but the wind is all over the place at this point and all I can remember is the course we should have been steering so I set her for that. What I actually need to do is set her to steer to the wind while it is wavering so much but I can’t remember how to do it. This means I have to sit at the helm and every couple of minutes change the course according to the wind. I do this for over an hour (boring, boring) trying to wait until at least 8.30 am before I wake Mike up to sort it all out for me and once again explain the not very hard principle of steering to the wind. I just find this very complex to take in.
It’s a quiet day as the wind dies off in the morning, picking up a bit more in the afternoon, and dying away again in the evening, so we have the motor on a lot, partly to charge the batteries because the generator won’t stay on at all today, and partly to actually get us somewhere when the wind dies to nothing.
Mike has the fishing line out all day but we don’t get one bite. Our balloon-wearing jelly squid is obviously not attractive enough to whatever is down there.
The wind in the afternoon wants to take us to the south side of the Vava’u group of islands instead of our plotted course to the north and after trying to sail the original course, Mike gives up and lets the boat go where she wants to go. It makes no real difference except that we leave Dreamcatcher and Ronja to our starboard side and by tea time they have disappeared into the distance.
Again there is just blue all around, nothing to look at or photograph. At least I have the second of the Stieg Larsson books to occupy me and I manage a long sleep in the afternoon. We should arrive in Tonga before lunchtime tomorrow.
Our position is: 18 deg 51 min S, 173 deg 16 min W
Distance so far: 8122 nautical miles
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