Monday 23rd July

At Sea

12 50.118 S
144 23.834 W (at Midnight)

I’d like to say I felt better by morning but that isn’t the case, I felt like I’d been hit with a sledge hammer, I ached all over as if I had flu. I dosed myself up as best I could and tried to do as much as I could - that’s one of the problems of there only being 2 of us, we can’t afford for either one of us to not function to some degree. By sun rise the wind dropped off again, down to 6 knots which left us doing 4.5 knots in a good moment, it was painful as the sails just flap and bang around with the swell. We tried to goose wing the sails but they just back winded each other and in the end we got sick of the constant banging and furled the jib away, trying to maintain some movement with just the main. At one point Gerry thought the main track was lifting as the main slapped and he went to have a closer look – inviting disaster. Lying on the deck was the steel roller from the top of the main sheet block, broken in two. It didn’t have a direct impact on the working of the block but it is something else that we are going to have to fix when we get to Tahiti – the list is growing to gigantic proportions! For the rest of the day we continued to ghost along, doing 4 knots if we were lucky and praying for wind to arrive soon whilst cursing at the weather forecasters who seem to get it wrong every day. Again we ate dinner at sunset and then the wind appeared – it’s becoming the regular pattern. We spent most of the night with the wind at 14 knots and we made a respectable 6-7 knots for most of the night, which is just as well otherwise we would take forever to get to Tahiti. By the time we began night watches I was beginning to feel a little better and managed to do my fair share of the night without incident.