Last afternoon had been hot and slow. Eventually, with our moving away from the High, the sky turned cloudy and it became cooler. But then, very suddenly, the clouds disappeared and wind slowed down considerably. The High seemed to have suddenly expanded. And indeed, as we later noticed from the weather charts, the High had almost explosively stretched by a few hundred miles. There went our hope for better wind! This morning's chart showed another surprise: a cold front coming from the North-East. If you click on the weather map picture on the Cirrus blogsite, you will see today's chart. This weather is not even close what you would expect in the summertime on the Pacific. Will be interesting to see what the next days bring. Right now we are moving at a very satisfactory 8kn again. The sea is basically flat; swells maybe 2-3 feet, small waves only. As we are going downwind, the boat rides calm and quiet.

Last day we did somewhat better than the day before, but so did the other boats. Overall not many changes, except that California Girl is now really benefiting from their south course. Well, we would have been to slow anyway for such a detour. We have the lightest spinnaker flying, and even did already some jibes, i.e. changing the course to the wind, where the sail goes from one side of the boat to the other. This becomes interesting on Cirrus with our two spinnaker poles. Each pole has three lines to control, each spinnaker corner another two, plus the mainsail control lines, plus the boom breaker, so you are dealing with a good dozen of lines to change course under spinnaker. The advantage is that you can maintain tight control over the heavy spinnaker poles, and prevent them from moving around on the foredeck, which could be quite dangerous, as someone would have to be on the foredeck during the maneuver.

The sea water has become warm enough that we have begun taking saltwater showers. Still a bit on the "refreshing" side, but wonderful. And here comes my bi-annual lecture on saltwater usage for showering. Most of you will remember some beach vacation, where you very much looked for a freshwater shower to "get the salt off" your skin. Well, after saltwater showers taken in the middle of the ocean there is no such need. You feel wonderfully refreshed with no itchy feeling at all. You can even wash your hair and it becomes just as airy as with a freshwater rinse. Since we cannot afford to use our drinking water for showering, this is certainly a good thing. My explanation is that the difference to saltwater at a beach is that near shore the concentration of protein from decaying organic material might be acting as a glue to bind the salt to the skin, and that such protein concentration is much more reduced over deep water.

No traffic seen for the last 30h, no ships, no boats. The only other living creature around us was a huge Albatross .

Aloha,
Ulli

position at 1300 PDT : 30N10, 134W35, COG:242M, SOG: 7.9kn