Sunday 22nd July

At Sea

11 17.681 S
142 40.028 W (at Midnight)

A very happy birthday Mark, hope you manage to have a decent glass of wine or two.

The rest of our night was uneventful and we continued to move along albeit slowly through out the entire night. As soon as the sun rose though the little wind we had died and we were wallowing around for most of the day, lucky to be reaching 4 knots at times, at least the swell was small too. Gerry did the radio schedule at 07.30hrs and chatted to Timella and Y Not. Timella have decided to call into the Marquesas after all as they are running low on butter and flour, I think we were all relieved to hear that they were going to stop as we couldn’t imagine them doing the straight shot Fiji at 2 knots it would take them forever. Mid morning Gerry turned the engine on to top up the batteries and fridge, then disaster struck - the chart plotter turned itself off and we couldn’t get it to start up again. We thought it might be too great a drain on the power with the fridge going so we turned that off – still no chart plotter,out came one of the tool bags and the process of diagnosis began. First we took apart the housing for the chart plotter and tested the power input,(there was none)so then we chased the wiring back to the lazarette and found that the power supply to there was fine – somewhere between the two there was something amiss,Gerry had a thought that it might be the fuse blown, unfortunately the fuse is housed beneath the cockpit floor and to get to it we had to rip up the floor whilst moving along. It took some gymnastics to do it but we succeeded and Gerry got to the fuse – it wasn’t blown but as he replaced it the chart plotter burst back into life, we concluded that the fuse must have worked loose in the plastic housing. In some ways it was a good thing that there was no wind and we were just drifting along when all this was going on. We reassembled everything and got back to the business of willing the wind to come up and blow us along. The sun was hot and without a breeze it was quite torturous in the cockpit. Our only other bit of excitement for the day was seeing a ship at 15.30hrs, it passed behind us at about 9 miles. We watched the sun set as we ate dinner and shortly after that the wind finally put it an appearance and blew up to 15 knots on the beam – perfect, just what we had wanted all day. We began the night watches moving along at a reasonable pace. I woke from the first sleep period with the most violent stomach pains, feeling nauseous and very unwell, Gerry was fine so it had to have been something that I’d eaten and he hadn’t, I finally put it down to a couple of sticks of salami that I’d had mid afternoon,(not that it helped knowing the cause). I did a minimum amount of watch that night, Gerry took pity on me and let me sleep as much as possible. The good thing was that we moved along most of the night at about 5.5 – 6 knots. At least this speed gets us there by the time Abigail arrives.