Friday 8th June

At sea

0 25.146 S
84 53.332 W (at Midnight)

Well this was to be a very uneventful day. Gerry was unable to hear the other boats on the radio schedule this morning – too much interference possibly from all the cloud cover, but we did get an email from JJ Moon giving us their position and the weather conditions there. We continued on the new tack and were delighted to find that we picked up speed without also collecting more swell or chop. We managed to sail for the entire 24hrs – unheard of until today! The wind speed varied between 5 and 8 knots and we sailed at an average speed of 6.5 knots – all pretty good. The clouds remained with us, we are beginning to wonder where the sun has gone to, we don’t see it rise and we don’t see it set but it must be out there some place as it does get lighter during the hours from 06.00 to 18.00. Gerry managed to find some mischief – well if you go looking for it you are bound to find it! He noticed that the fridge would only run for a very short time off of the inverter before the voltage dropped; he tried to charge the batteries but found that the voltage hadn’t risen appreciably after a fair amount of time on charge. We normally have both batteries on line all the time ad Gerry switched to each battery individually to measure their voltages separately; battery 1 was at 13 volts and battery 2 was at 11 volts, as they are 12 volt batteries there was obviously a problem with battery 2. Whilst we can manage with the one battery we will be changing out the second battery as soon as we can at the Galapagos Islands. Again we had a line in the water all day long – still no fish though! The only time the sea got a bit "lumpy" was when I went to cook dinner, thank goodness for the ready prepared meals I had made before taking off. It was truly another day of "nothing" – as in no fish, no sun, no rain, no stars, no moon, no dolphins, no turtles, no whales and no other boats however this all changed at the 11th hour (or to be more precise at the 23rd hour) we spotted the lights of a lone fishing boat in the middle of nowhere – it was the only sign of life we saw all day. At least it was a successful day as far as sailing went!