During the night we passed the halfway point. We are moving along briskly under reefed main and pole-out yankee. Rangval (our Monitor wind-vane self-steering) is doing an admirable job at the tiller, making life a lot easier for the person on watch.
In the middle of the night we had some excitement. I was awakened by a whole lot of clattering of sails and rigging and saw that Gay was already headed up the companionway ladder. Rangval's vane had come loose and without access to the wind's direction, the device had initiated a jibe. The boom was actually prevented from jibing by the preventer line which leads forward from the end of the boom through a block near the bow and thence back to a cockpit winch. Controlling the line with the winch, Gay let the boom jibe and then was able to steer back towards our course and jibe again. The vane was not lost overboard because I always secure it with an extra safety line. Pete reattached the vane, reset its direction and Gay turned the steering chore back to the Rangval.
This really looks like trade wind country now. On all sides we see the small puffy low-flying clouds so characteristic of this region. Once in a while, the sun shines down between clouds.
Although our day's run is the same as yesterday's, we are traveling faster. The yankee poled out to windward limits how close to the wind we can sail and this has forced us to sail below our course, diminishing the distance made good in the direction of Hawaii somewhat less.
I may have mentioned that every morning I download a weather data (grib) file as an attachment to an email that the saildocs server sends me. The file is slightly larger than the size of the maximum file that sailmail will allow, hence I use a compatible amateur radio based system called winlink instead. Once the email message has arrived and the attached grib has been saved, we examine the data as a geographical image using zygrib, an open-source grib viewer.
The gribs are showing us that as we travel westward, the wind will be more and more from the east, so we will be able to regain our northing without having to abandon the wing-on-wing sail plan which we like a lot because it is very stable and balanced.
Today the AIS receiver showed us a freighter 80 miles away. That is far beyond the normal range, because AIS is based on VHF marine radio, which is line-of-sight. The ship is a freighter. From its course, it seems to be headed for Hawaii and is projected to overtake us and pass 10 miles to starboard in approximately seven hours.
At 1800 UTC, June 14, 2012, we are located at 23 16.624 N, 134 20.084 W, 1320 miles from Honolulu. Our day's run was 129 miles.
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