A Day at Sea

May 10, 2008--Yesterday was a very good day as we averaged 7 knots all day. Last night things calmed down a bit, but we still made pretty good time. The sky last night was spectacular, with millions of stars visible. Steve's favorite is the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper is visible to the north, but it is very low in the sky. We are working to identify others.

A rain cloud passed quickly over us last night and dropped a small amount of rain. Other than that, the seas were calm and the winds fairly stable. We had a spectacular sunrise this morning with rays from the sun shooting up through one of many cumulonimbus clouds in the sky. Steve got some good pictures of it. Today we noticed that the color of the water had turned from a dark, almost oil color, to the most beautiful cobalt blue. Late in the morning we had more rain showers, and these gave us more fresh water to help wash off the boat.

I was looking out at the sea when I saw a large gray shape in the water off our port beam, but I didn't see a dorsal fin so I knew it wasn't a shark. It turned out to be dolphins; however, these dolphins were different in that they rarely came up for air. Most of the time that they were swimming around the boat, they stayed just below the surface.

We are running the engine now to charge the batteries a bit. Actually, with the sunny days and the wind over the past two days, we have done very well charging with the solar panels and the wind generator.

We hope to arrive at Fakarava in the Tuamotus early on Monday if the current weather conditions hold. We have definitely learned that schedules don't mean much out here--the weather does what it wants to, not what we want it to.

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