UTC/Local 21:12/13:12
Latitude: 00 23.885 S
Longitude: 130.36.684 W
After traveling 1,937 miles from Mexico and 750 miles from Hiva Oa, we crossed the equator this morning at 1155 Zulu and 0355 local time. Garyn was on watch, Russ and I were sleeping. About 15 minutes before reaching
the equator, we were awakened from our sleep with Michael Jackson's Thriller. We quickly got out of bed. The wind was blowing about 12 knots, we were traveling at 4:00 knots, with all of our sails (main, mizzen, cutter, and jib), on a close reach port tack. A south pacific breeze filled the cabin. The full moon was still high on our starboard side shining through the sails on to the foredeck and shimmering across the sea and illuminating the white foam on the leeward side as Worrall Wind cut through the 1 meter swells at the equator.
We captured the moment with a print screen of our navigation software. How sweet to see all zeroes in the latitude line. Earlier in the evening, we sacrificed Russ's silver locks to Neptune. Now it was time to give him a sip of Dom Perignon, Vintage 1990 champaign. We paid our ritual respects to the god of the sea with the first glass of the chilled bubbly. We each dipped our hands into the sea from the leeward side of the boat (foregoing the swim), licked the salt from our fingers and enjoyed the rest of the bottle with Neptune, sending the bottle to the bottom of the sea. We are sure it is in good company. It is a special memory we will have forever. And it was an excellent champaign. I guess now we are considered shellbacks. Not sure what that means exactly. Maybe somebody can look it up and let us know the origin of this word. Sounds like a sea turtle to us.
We stayed up until 5:00 a.m. enjoying the equatorial moon and dawn with Garyn. I went back to sleep until the morning net at 7:00 a.m. (1500 Zulu). Today, we are on a course of 200 degrees, still on a close reach. The wind has been constant but not strong. We hope it will pickup and shift around so that we can be on more of a beam and travel a little faster. We are getting anxious to reach land after 23 days at sea and probably another week. We are looking forward to our daughter-in-law Jessica joining us in the Marquesas. She will be flying into Atuona on Saturday, May 8.
We've been reading, listening to Sea Wolf, relaxing and adjusting to a port tack. We have decided that Worrall Wind is better suited for starboard tack. On that tack we are pushed back into the settee seats, the hot food on the stove is away from the cook, we're not falling off the toilet seat, and the shower drains like it is supposed to. On the port tack, it feels like an uphill walk to everything we need to do and our achilles tendons are getting constantly stretched as we cant forward.
It's 79 degrees this afternoon, very pleasant. We're just lopping along. It seems as if we may have a counter current to our direction as our speed over ground has dropped to under 4 knots. We may need to fire up Lehman and Ray here in a bit. But in the meantime this is pretty darn nice!
All is well on Worrall Wind
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