25 August - Unsettled Weather

0600 position 24-13S 161-09W. Day's run 128 miles.

The wind direction stayed out of the southwest all day, but slowly died in
strength. Matt unreefed sails one by one during his morning watch, and I
did my afternoon watch under full sail. We were sailing along nicely all
morning, but by the mid-afternoon there were five minute long holes in the
wind where our speed dropped well below six knots. Wind and boat speed
continued to decrease, until we gave up trying to sail at 9PM and turned
the engine on. After eight hours of powering, the wind started to fill in
from the north west at 5AM, so we shut the engine off and are ghosting
along.

I must confess that until today I harbored the impossible dream that we
would make it all the way to Raivavae without ever sailing to windward.
It is amazing that we have made it this far. We are over half way there
now, and it is beginning to look like the next weather system will carry
us the rest of the way in. It should arrive sometime tomorrow morning and
start with a tail wind that slowly backs from west to south to east over
the next few days. The last day or so of the voyage will likely be with
the wind on the nose. We'll see.

This is a pretty barren and lonely part of the ocean. We've seen no sign
of human presence on the planet since the single ship I spotted the first
evening out of Vava'u. We are outside of any shipping lanes that I am
aware of, and the closest land is the southern Cook Islands 200 miles to
the north. We've seen dense patches of flying fish but only a few birds.
I had a booby visit two days ago and an albatross stuck around for a few
hours today.