18 May - Niuatoputapu or Bust!

0600 position 13-39S 165-09W. 122 miles from Suwarrow Atoll

Wait a minute, you say. It's not the 18th of May, it's the 17th. Ah,
that depends on where you are. Somewhere in this passage to Tonga we will
be crossing the international dateline and it will be tomorrow today, so
we decided to adjust our clocks and our calendars when we left Suwarrow.
It puts the clocks more in sync with the sun's position now compared to
when we left Hawaii and we won't need to change anything once we arrive in
Tonga.

In my last post I neglected to mention one of the most exciting and
meaningful of yesterday's experiences. Clean sheets. We are well past
the half way point, time wise, of our journey and we have two sets of
sheets for each of us aboard the boat. As dry below as Moku pe'a is,
there is still salt everywhere, and it gets on everything, including our
bodies and especially our feet. After you get in and out of bed a few
times, you've transferred some of that salt from your feet and legs to
the sheets and from then on the sheets are constantly sticky and damp.
Yuck. It just gets worse and worse until we either wash the sheets or
replace them. So we slept great our first night at anchor with clean
sheets. However, I've already been in and out a few times and they are
starting to get sticky again. Sigh.

Last night Tom, a rally cruiser from Maine that we met, came over with a
pomplamouse (jabong, pomelo) and a couple of limes for us that they had
picked up in Bora Bora. Ooooooh. Of course, we invited him to help us
get rid of one of the limes by mixing it with rum and we had a great time.
He's on a Swan 51, the oldest, cheapest ($500K), and as he is so proud of
saying, fastest boat in the rally.

We put the pomplamouse in the reefer and had it for breakfast this
morning. So good. Then put the dinghy away, cleaned up for sea, and had
the anchor up at 1000. We departed Suwarrow's pass just as another boat
was entering. It really is crowded out here! Left turn past Anchorage
Island, jybe at Turtle Island, put the jib out on the pole, and we were on
our way dead down wind to Niuatoputapu, Tonga, 638 miles away.

Late this afternoon we spent about twenty minutes sailing though an area
full of feeding birds and tuna. We could see the tuna (looked like small
ahi to me) jumping, hitting the surface, and darting around just below the
surface all around the boat. Flying fish were scattering and I saw one
get picked off by a bird in flight. Nice to know that there are still a
lot of fish in some parts of the ocean.

We hooked into a nice seven pound rainbow runner off of the point at
Turtle Island this morning and had him for dinner sauted in a garlic, lime
(no lemons), butter, caper sauce over pasta with a little parmesan cheese
and green beans. Outstanding.

This downwind sailing is what the "Coconut Milk Run", the annual sailboat
migration from North America to New Zealand, is all about. No tipping, no
water on deck, seven knots of speed in the right direction. I could get
used to this. Rocky wanted me to be sure to mention how stunning it was
tonight. Full moon, wing and wing, slip sliding down the face of the
waves, perfect no shirt temperature on deck. Hopefully it will be just
like this all the way to Tonga, but the gribs say that a low passing to
the south will mess it up for us for during the second half of this leg.

The only thing that marred tonight's perfection was some problems with the
autopilot. It shuts down and restarts, effectively going from "active" to
"standby" mode due to undervoltage at the control module. You can imagine
the excitement when that happens and the boat spins out…. I've studied
the problem, and there is a momentary voltage drop at the main electrical
panel whenever the autopilot actuator engages to turn the wheel. If the
batteries aren't completely topped up and there is a large load on the
system (autopilot, refrigerator, computer, and some lights all on), then
the voltage gets low enough during the momentary drop at the autopilot
(10.5 volts) to shut the unit off. Note that voltage at the batteries was
12.1 volts, an acceptable level. An instant after the autopilot shuts off
the load goes away, the voltage rises above 10.5 volts, and the autopilot
restarts going to its default standby mode. I think that either the
wiring between the batteries and the panel is too small (because we are
seeing both the momentary voltage drop there and voltage at the panel is
approximately 0.3 volts less than at the batteries) or there is excessive
resistance in a connection somewhere between the batteries and the panel.
Could be on either the positive or negative side of the circuit. When it
gets light I will try to jump both sides of the panel feed circuit to see
if I get any improvement and hopefully isolate the problem. Any of you
electrical engineers/electricians/electronic geniuses have any ideas for
me? Respond to the blog or email Lori if you do and it will get to me via
email.