Sailing across the Pacific Ocean - Day 16

Little midday update from the bow today. Trying to get you a little bit of a different angle. We've had a really pleasant night. We ran dead downwind again. We went wing and wing. And that gave us a super nice angle, running dead square with the waves and the wind, or not dead square, but nearly. Again, 165 she seems to really enjoy. And it gave us a good night's sleep and some rest. It's a bit slower, but it allows us to run a hotter angle during the day. So we end up off the rum line a little bit. And then at night we jibe the headsail, run dead downwind, come back into the rum line. You'll probably see on the track a little bit what we've been doing. And yeah, we figure we'll just try and run straight down the rum line now. Breeze looks good for it. The wind will swing a little bit between 90 and sort of 120 true. But, you know, so it's, yeah, it's really looking fantastic actually. We're just having a great sail. Yeah, the boat's going fantastic. Ran the engine for about three hours last night. We do it at night so that we can top the batteries up a bit. No use doing it while we've got the solar producing so much power. So we just do it at night. And yeah, topped up the water tanks, ran the water maker for the three hours. That's the only reason we run the engine is to run the water maker. You can see we're getting quite a bit of growth now along the bow there. And I had a look, there's quite a lot of gooseneck barnacles growing on the hull. So I'm sure that's starting to, yeah, probably slow us down a little bit. It's pretty amazing how quickly they grow and the gooseneck barnacles are quite big. But it's to be expected. It happens on this passage. I think it happens to everyone. I don't know one boat that gets there and doesn't have to scrub the bottom. But yeah, we're just loping along anywhere from sort of seven, surfing at tens. We're steering wind angles and we're on about 110 at the moment. So the breeze is just coming off the port quarter. The last nearly six days, we've been logging, five days, sorry, we've been logging 200 mile days and just above sort of 206, 212 miles, which is awesome. We've been trailing the miles away these last few days. And that gives us around about 1,350 nautical miles to Nooga Hever or Heveroa. We're not sure where we're gonna pull in yet. We'll wait and see what the wind dictates. It'll be the angle of the breeze on the last couple of days that sort of decide where we end up going and clearing in. And yeah, that means we've done, looked at the trip log before, we've done 1,750 nautical miles so far. So I'd say if we can carry on with the 200 mile days, we should be there in seven days, another week. So we'll see how we go, but it's looking that way. The forecast is pretty much same, same. Yeah, boat's going great, we're going great. Sleeping really well, eating really well. I gave, when I had the water maker on last night, I gave the cockpit a really thorough clean and a wash, which is really nice. It's nice to try and keep the boat clean, not just clean and organized, but clean from salt. Because when the boat's salty, you tend to walk it inside, you touch everything with salt, then you walk it around, you carry it into the bed, if you don't sort of keep the cockpit clean. And then that salt accumulates over time and it never dries. So you end up, you'll go to bed and the bed'll feel wet. Anyway, she changed the bed linen yesterday. And yeah, I gave the cockpit a really thorough clean, that's why we've got the sides down. So we just try and keep the splashing. Occasionally, like every sort of 15, 20 minutes, the float will slap. And as it slaps, the water goes straight into the cockpit sometimes, just to spray. And especially sometimes off the transom of the float back there, it really gets a wave whack and it'll just spray in. But yeah, everything's great, boat's great. And she just lopes along so easily. It's really, yeah, it's amazing how slippery she is and how easily she moves through the water. You know, to be able to think we've only got, you know, really 14, probably 14 knots of breeze out there, it's not a lot. And yeah, we've got two tucks in the mainsail and that full headsail up, we're running, you know, 110s. And we're still managing, you know, to sit on eight knots is pretty good. We're taking it pretty easy. It'd be nice to throw the full main up and to pump along a little bit, but you know, you feel that the boat loads up and she starts taking off down waves. We'd really like to wait till we've had the boat hauled out and then we've had the rig removed and we've really gone over everything. And it's just not really wise to do that sort of thing out here in the middle of the Pacific when we're still getting to know the boat. So once we get all that done, we'll definitely be able to give her a little bit more curry but we're really happy with the progress that we make when we're, even when we're taking it super easy like this. And I think that's the joy of cruising on a performance multi-hull, whether it's a catamaran or a trimaran or even monohulls, you know. When you've got a boat that slides along so easily and that can manage eight knots in 200 mile days, super easy in 15 knots of breeze, it's a real joy. You don't have to push the boat to do miles. Whereas if you've got a slow or a heavier boat, don't get me wrong, I love all boats, but you just have to push the boat a lot harder to be able to do the miles. And, you know, I think that's definitely one of the huge benefits. One of the things we really love is that it's so easy to do eight knots. We don't wanna do 20 knots or, you know, sit on 16. We just wanna do eight to 10 but we wanna do it easily and safely and that's the joy of a performance boat. Got the fishing line out, but yeah, no takers yet. We had a little hammerhead swim past yesterday and I could see he turned around and eyed it off but I followed the boat for a few seconds and then swam away. The catamaran that we went past the other day, the XS, I was really surprised. We've got them on the AIS, they're about 40 nautical miles behind us. You can see here what we're doing, sitting on eights. Yeah, 15 knots of breeze, 110, and an apparent wind angle today, 110. But yeah, the little XS, which is only a little 40 foot, I think they're just pretty much like a performance lagoon. Anyway, when we came up near them, I remember I said in the update the other day, we passed them sort of doing nines and they were doing six and a half. Well, as we got a little bit closer, they, yeah, must've pulled out a reacher because I could see where the binoculars were really nice black laminated sail and man, they took off. I have to say, I was very surprised at their turn of speed. We went past them, we caught them, and yeah, okay, we had two reefs in the main and the headsail, but we were clocking 12, 13s at times. It piped up quite a bit, the breeze, that afternoon. We had an awesome sail. And yeah, we got past them, but it was really not fast. They were doing a really good turn of speed. It was really impressive. It was cool. All right, well, let's go in and just have a quick look what Chloe's doing. She's got the Thermomix on the go. Yeah, carrot cake. What are you cooking? Carrot cake. Carrot cake, and what have we got here? Falafel. We've got some falafel for lunch, and that's Chitty's oven over there that she uses to cook the cake in. And yeah, everything good. You're going all right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's all right. Masturbation. Yeah. Yeah, found that we get a bit bruised. She gets a bit bruised leaning up against the galley bench. She's just putting this little bit of padding around her waist. But our little plants are going well. Everyone's super happy. And yeah, fantastic. All right, everyone. Really hope that you're doing great. And yeah, you can see there's a little bit of water that's just come in there from a splash out the back. Anyway, yeah, best wishes from Chloe and I. Hope you're doing fantastic. And yeah, I'll give you a little bit of a view out the front and stop talking. All the best, everyone. Cheers for now.