Day 8 - Pacific Crossing - 30th March

My prediction that we would be motoring through the night was correct. With only 4-5 knots of apparent breeze from behind and a fair swell from our port side we were unable to get either Paul or the autopilot to push the parasail along sufficiently. We did have a visitor though. A large red footed booby took up residence on the bow and stayed there all night. [He's back again this evening but with the parasail flying he has to dodge all the lines there today as well as a very large sail. He's just managed to land after a hilarious 20 minutes circling and failing to make it, including an effort where he tried to hang on with his bill!].

Then the wind picked up and we hoisted the main and staysail. Then it dropped so we put them away again. Then there was a bit more wind and we spent most of the afternoon trying to fly the parasail again. In these light airs everything has to be spot on and finally at 2.00pm we seem to have managed it for the time being. We could have done with you Peter today as I'm pretty sure you could have got it working where we couldn't.

I had a list of jobs to do today. I don't think I did any of them. But I did catch a fish. We were ready for fish again today so for the second time only the rods were out. After a while I looked back and there was a small tuna being towed along. Too small to set the drag alarm off he was dead by the time he was aboard. And very tasty he was too made all the sweeter by the fact that again I caught him on a homemade lure. Total cost around $1.

We dipped the diesel tank today and we're surprised to find we've used 120 litres, more than expected. So a jerry can was carted to the cockpit and filtered into the top tank. We also transferred 100 litres from the bottom one to the top tank. Hopefully not too many full nights of motoring as we have used over 1/4 of our total already.

Tomorrow we should pass the 1,000 mile mark. After our lowest daily total so far today let's hope for a cracking day tomorrow.

Finally thanks for all the messages. Amazing! But there are so many our radio download system is struggling. Could you please make sure you limit emails to just the basic texts and for a couple of days only send really important ones to give us chance to catch up. Thanks.



email (text only, no pictures) to mvgc3@sailmail.com

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