Well we had a record day on day one of our passage from Suwarrow to Samoa - 168 nautical miles in 24 hours - an average of 7 knots. To put this in perspective, our average speed over 5500 miles from Mexico has been 4.5 knots. However, such speed comes at a price - high winds and high waves make for very uncomfortable sailing and poor Rani has been green for the first couple of days. She is better now and was able to keep down a meal of fries and eggs this afternoon.
Also - back at home, the new tenant in our house had a sewage back-up as soon as she moved in. They are blasting behind our house, which may have caused a pipe to collapse, but whatever the cause, we feel bad for our tenant and also for our friends, Dave and Patrick Rife who we asked to fix the problem. They spent a messy few hours in our crawl space and for that we are very grateful and also a bit guilty-feeling! It is certainly frustrating trying to deal with issues like this from a sailboat in the middle of an ocean and I am swinging over to the camp that advocates selling the house before you leave on an extended voyage!
We are about 170 miles out of Samoa at 13 56 S 168 52 w. The seas are down from yesterday's 3+ meters but things are still rolly and we are barrelling along at 6+ knots. We look forward to making landfall at Apia on Friday morning (Thursday back at home - we cross the international date line tomorrow).
2 comments:
Hi Chris and Rani,
We can empathize with the sea conditions. We had similar conditions on our overnight passage from Moorea to Bora Bora. From their blog entry, Sockdolager was also underway from Aitutaki to Palmerston, and my thoughts traveled many times to the "one of the smallest boats in the fleet" during our own overnighter. The weather seems to be deteriorating far in advance of what I expected (in terms of the approaching cyclone season), but what do I know? I've never done this before.
Kirsten
SV Silhouette
It is really nice to know that you have friends whom you can count on in times like that. You should really be grateful. But I guess you can have your chance to return those favors too.
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