Day 3: Happy Birthday, Greg!

It’s Greg’s birthday today! The celebratory mood on the boat continues. While no gift can compare to the experience of finally finishing repairs and making our way to the Caribbean, Greg is getting gifts anyway. The kids have done magnificent art pieces, Mel is cooking something special, and Gypsy finally pooped, allowing us all to worry less about her. Even the ocean gave Greg a gift. We had dolphins this morning (a frequent sight lately) and, as Greg sat on the bow watching them frolic, one surfaced and shot water out of its blowhole, forming a mist that transformed the sun’s rays into a magnificent rainbow.

No, seriously. That REALLY happened. A dolphin spouted a rainbow.

The seas are calmer now, and the 4 meter waves are now down to 2-3 meters. The kids are less happy about this as one might think, as this means school will start soon.

We ran the Watt&Sea hydrogenerator yesterday and it did what it always does: work for 10 minutes putting out 20 watts before the wire connecting it to the boat snaps. Greg is smugly repairing it at the moment with the extra-heavy wire that Mel has always given him crap about carrying around on the boat. Mel takes this defeat graciously. After all, it’s his birthday.

Boat stuff: 177 nm in 23 hrs, average 7.7 kts, spinnaker up without the main, no engines. While the waves got big last night, the wind topped out at just 23 kts true, 15 apparent, so the spinnaker has been up constantly. We are running on wind vane mode on the autopilot, keeping the wind between 145 and 160, starboard tack. Greg asked that the spinnaker be made to go way downwind, and it looks like it handles even a straight run just fine, all the way up to 160 on the opposite tack (briefly, with the big waves). So that’s good.