Oh my goodness, we had a great day.  We finally got the trade winds, through up the spinnaker and experienced the type of day that everyone told us about.  This is how the crossing is supposed to be, this is sailing!  My spirits have lifted just because the winds shifted.  There was no engine noise, no generator, water maker or washer machine – just the wind in our sails and the sea under our boat – perfect.  To top it off there was a gorgeous rainbow off the port side of the boat at the horizon – it’s like Mother Nature is telling us to have a great day.  We averaged about 20+ knots of wind, 10-12 knots of boat speed and great VMG.  We averaged about 30 miles per shift and hit a 200+ mile day.  Not many boats or sailors can say that they sailed a 200 mile day and we did it – thank God!

After 14 days of not being on my crack berry, phone or computer I finally decided to try to send an email to my family and friends as I was certain they wanted to hear from me.  During my shift, when the boat was floating across the waters, I climbed onto the noisy navigation chair and tried to type.  First it was weird trying to remember where the keys were on the key board, and then I had to adjust my stance to accommodate the shifting of the boat as that shifts the keyboard.  Once I got into a rhythm it flowed and it felt amazing. It was good to share my thoughts and feelings, but probably not so good to be as honest as I was for the first communication.   After that I got productive online as there were a lot of things that I needed to do too: cancel cookie baking day, extend the day care for our home and fish care, alert my work of our delay and make sure some tasks were completed, and reschedule all of our flights.  Once I got that all done I went back to my shift to enjoy the spinnaker sail.  It is part of my personality; I like the check list and today was a good day to √ things off the to-do list!

We are officially ½ way across the Atlantic ocean today, so I made Flap jacks to celebrate.  As I made Mickey Mouse pancakes for the boys they read the history of a flap jack which was an interesting story, really!  Today was beautiful, warm and fairly calm. It was a great day to be on the water, but a bad day for sailing with a goal toward your destination.  However, this made it a perfect day to get a big chunk of the inventory done. I started on the starboard side as I can clean it out and put “un-essential” items in one place (for quick unloading once at St Lucia).  I attacked all starboard storage areas including the cabinets, floor board storage, head and under the bed storage – it was a huge undertaking, but a good work day.  I removed everything from the area, determined if usefulness, sorted it.  If it made the “keep” pile, it was cleaned. Once everything was removed, I cleaned the storage area and returned the clean, keep items and inventoried the area.   After working on the starboard side, I started working on the galley (not the salon seating storage areas as that is its own task).  It was hard to really get through the galley area when there is so much food. I don’t want to discard anything including the expired food for fear that we might need to eat it – guess I will need to do that when we get ashore.  I did inventory the plate ware, glass ware, utensils, pots, pans, baking items, etc…when we get ashore I will have to take everything out, sort, clean, inventory and place in storage areas that make more sense to us.

In addition to all of my cleaning and inventory work, I managed to get 2 more loads of laundry done so we all have clean clothes.  This time we only used ¼ tank for 2 loads, much better on the delicate cycle.  I know it sounds like a no brainer, but having the low suds laundry detergent is great – but it just doesn’t smell as nice as my Tide Lavender from home.   We toasted our ½ way mark with rum, vodka and gin (not mixed together silly, the boys had rum and diet; I had vodka sprite and Marvin and gin).  I thought the vodka would help me sleep but unfortunately it eluded me most of the night.  Between the pounding of the boat, the light from the navigation station and the squeaking of the navigation chair I got about 3 hours of sleep – made for a tough shift.  We were heading in the wrong direction with full sails up and 23 knots of wind.  So, I woke Matt up to help me jibe the boat.  We did and lost all boat speed so we tacked back but took a different angle.  He headed back to bed so I could finish my shift. By the time my replacement came up, an hour late because he overslept, I crashed and slept hard.

I can’t tell you how irritating it is to wake up to 1-2 knots of boat speed.  This is not the first time it has happened and it is more aggravating than you can imagine.  It appears that not all of our crew members are on the same page as to the goal of this trip – deliver the boat as safely and quickly as possible.  Matt has had to have a chat with the crew to ensure that we stay on course hit the best VMG as possible and keep the boat speed up as much as the boat can safely handle without beating up the crew.  It is hard to believe that we have been at sea for 12 days and are ½ way through our fuel and food and are only ½ way across the Atlantic.

We ran the water maker to fill up our water tanks again today (I love the water maker).  However, the water from the water maker is supposed to taste like regular water, but it tastes salty which means the water maker was not de-pickled properly during the first part of the crossing and/or something is wrong with one of the filers – Matt will have to fix it when we get to St Lucia – for now we will have to deal with salty water L.

I was able to convince the boys that we need to run the washer machine as we had worn and re-worn the same clothes for almost 2 weeks.  Of course I did not want to listen to the directions given to me and I ran the machine on “normal” load which sucked all the water out of one of the tanks – lesson learned.  We will re-fill the tanks and try another load tomorrow.  Even though this is a washer/dryer we decided not to use the dryer to preserve the batteries.  So, we decorated the boat with our clean laundry and managed to pull off the ‘white trash” look pretty well.

Ron cooked a wonderful dinner using part of the fish that they caught – I loved it.  Yes, you read that right, little miss non-fish eating girl loved the fresh fish dinner.

We ended up running one engine and averaged 100 miles today (our goal is 150 per day).