Day 6 and 7

Day 6 (Jim says Day 5)

Another cloudy day with winds all over the board as light and as variable as bunny farts. (Thank you Garth <sv Irish Diplomacy>, for the furry simile!) After battling the fickle flows all morning and afternoon, we opted to change course and head south where at least we won't be tacking and jibing all through the night every 15 minutes while the wind decides whether it wants to burp left, right or center. We decided not to fly the spinnaker at night and instead wing-and-wing it down on a S-SW course. Generator cranked right up today so we could flush the watermaker and charge our Androids and Kindles where we have oodles of reading material stored. I did manage to toss out a fishing line, but didn't catch even the dumbest one due to our speed being way too slow.

Day 7 (Jim says Day 6)

Spinnaker is up and the sun is shining!
Our night watches are in synch now. Carolyne takes the 8pm – 12:30pm, Jim does 12:30 – 3am (but he lays in the cockpit while Carolyne is doing her watch) and I take 3am until whenever Jim gets up... usually around 8 or 8:30am.

Jim tossed the fishing line in while I took a cool shower – with the light breezes and southwest route it is getting invariably warmer and sweatier. Just as I was drying off I heard Jim jump on the deck and head aft – which means he caught a fish! Except there was no fish – there was a darn Boobie bird's feathered fanny caught in the line. Carolyne reeled the fouled fowl in while Jim grabbed leather gloves and pliers. I held the bird's body and Jim held the beak while Carolyne cut the line which had wrapped around one wing tip, then around the body and under and over the opposite wing – and became caught up in little feather tufts here and there in between. The little devil did manage to bite my wrist before Jim could get a hold of his sharp beak – there was a hole in the edge of my glove and he found it. I poured rubbing alcohol over my cut (despite that rubbing alcohol burns!) because I don't want to have some disgusting infection in the middle of nowhere.

Note about emails:
We cannot check our regular email accounts because we have no internet aboard. I am able to blog post using our Sailmail or Winlink accounts through our Pactor Modem – but I am unable to read any comments if they have been posted. We also received weather grib files via the Pactor in addition our friend Evan in Australia sending us daily updates on weather routing. (Thank you, Evan!)