Equator Party

We are in the Southern Hemisphere now!!! Yesterday at roughly 7:30 pm by the clocks we are running on, we crossed 0 latitude. Traditionally you are to have a celebration of this - it is as good an excuse as any - so we did. We had costumes for all of the crew, we were Tahitians - all of the same tribe. We cracked open a bottle of Champagne to share between ourselves and with King Neptune. We asked him to grant us continued good passage. And we had a photo shoot of ourselves (of course) and of the GPS screen to show the 0 00.000 latitude read out. We actually crossed the equator three times in a effort to get the photo as close to all zeros as possible. but the water was too full of swell and the best we got from all three cameras was 0 00.002 N . Our champagne bottle wouldn't cooperate for the photo shoot either, the cork would not pop, all three men trying to do the honors, so Russell finally had to pull out his pocket pliers and yank the cork out.

For the last 48 hrs we have had great current push from behind sending us up to 8.5 knots speed. The fuel burn has subsided such that we should have enough to reach our destination and have a 25% reserve. The weather is cooperating very nicely with temps of 28 deg and high humidity day and night requiring us to run the air conditioning in order to sleep. The seas are very nice, a long spaced 6-8 ft swell with a 2-3 ft sea on top. Looks like we will have these nice conditions right into Hiva Oa. We have 710 miles left to go and should arrive on the morning of Apr 17. We could however use one of those squalls to wash off the boat right now as it is totally covered with salt. Our current position is 01 34.370 S and 129 59.520 W. All of the fresh vegis and fruit have hung in there nicely, and we have been able to cook great meals with the nice sea conditions. It is good that we are well stocked with beer and wine and we will leave it at that!

We have had an electronics glitch. Our auto pilot lost heading information, causing our boat to make a hard right, as it turned back to the start point. This in turn caused our partner boat Oso Blanco to freak out as we came on to collision course with the only other boat in the near vicinity. Not to mention the craziness going on inside our boat while we tried to get the boat back on track. Happily this all happened during the day light. Oso Blanco called wanting to know if they should put the bumpers out! It seems that it was only a temp. satellite loss as everything has been operating fine since.

John and Russell are currently arguing over a card game and their friendship seems to be coming to an end!

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