MORE GYBE TRAINING NEEDED

Only one hundred and twelve miles sailed yesterday.  The wind has been quite light from astern and that’s the best we could do. The good news, the distance made good is all in the right direction towards Hilo.

Light winds from astern mean plenty of rolling.  Truce and I are now well accomplished in the art and ready to enter the world rolling championships.  If someone could figure a way of converting the energy created by rolling into forward propulsion they would be onto a winner.  It would be nice to get some advantage out of rolling, not just a headache.

I gybed the spinnaker pole over to the starboard side late yesterday afternoon.  The whole operation took me eighty minutes from start to finish, with countless trips from the cockpit to the fore deck.  Before I do the next gybe, I will sit down and map out how I can do less trips and improve line management.

The weather is much milder now, although there is still a bit of cold in the air.  Still not quite warm enough for shorts and T shirt unfortunately.  At beer o’clock I sat in the cockpit and listened to OMC on the speaker- nice fun music.  Reminds me of summer in NZ, how bizarre.

I haven’t noticed much rubbish in the sea.  This is good, places like the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea are so polluted they are unrecognisable from a few years ago.  I saw quite a bit of pollution in the Northern Pacific a couple of years ago – must be stuff flowing from Asia.

This afternoon I saw an American fishing boat.  He was only small and a long way from anywhere.  I didn’t speak to him, just wondered where he was from, where he was going, what he was fishing for.  The nearest land in the USA is eight hundred miles away so it must be valuable fish he is catching.  He probably wondered where I was sailing to.  Voyage distance 814 miles.