N 33°55.471’, W 137°35.842’What a day! The full moon last night was a great prelude for the day we had today. After a really nice sail last night and some initial fog and cloudiness in the morning, the sun broke through and it got down right hot in the cockpit. I was the first to don shorts but Richard was right behind me as the temperature soared. It did much to raise our spirits and we both spent all of our off-watch time in the cockpit enjoying the newly arrived warm weather.
Around mid-afternoon, we decided to raise the asymmetrical spinnaker and let that fly since we were having problems steadying the boat with the headsail out on the whisker pole. The spinnaker worked great and we sailed with that for the rest of the day. It’s still up right now and we are hoping that it will be able to remain flying through the night. If the wind gets too gusty we’ll have to take it down and replace it with a downwind sail configuration as a spinnaker sail is made of lighter fabric and cannot withstand the pressures created by winds higher than 16-18 knots. Right now we have variable winds ranging from 7-12 knots so if that continues we should be fine.
We also had two visitors today. The first was a moth! I know! How the hell does a moth get out over 300 miles off shore? The only explanation I can think of (and it’s not even a reasonable explanation at that) is that when we took the spinnaker sail bag out of the lazarette it flew out at the same time; but that doesn’t make any sense. In any event, it flew through the cockpit, headed towards the companionway, then shot off over the port rails and disappeared behind the boat. Weird!
The second visitor was a cargo ship heading to transit the Panama Canal. It looked like a floating warehouse to me. I took pictures only because it was something to take a picture of instead of the water.
Listening to My Morning Jacket’s Okonokos right now. Plowed through 9 hours of The Cure yesterday and wanted to jump overboard by the end of it.
Despite my banana-macadamia nut bread looking weird going into the oven yesterday, it tasted great today. Homage to mom!
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