Day 5- New Zealand to Fiji

We lost the wind again last night. It seems the light patch was following us and since we were right on the edge it started killing our breeze. Poor Delos was rolling around in the swells side to side, forward and backward. With almost no forward momentum and no wind pressure on the sails the ride was pretty uncomfortable. Everything is the boat was clanking and the sails were slapping. Stuff that hadn't moved beating upwind in 30 knots started to shift side to side with the swells. We were under 2 knots of boat speed so we packed it up and fired up the diesel wind maker.

The wind came back at 7AM. It was very light but enough to fill the sails so off with the engine and up with the sails again. A few hours later we had a beautiful sail in 12 knots of Southeast breeze for the rest of the day. We even put up my favorite sail- the mizzen spinnaker and ran with that all day long averaging 6 knots.

It was another sun lounging day as we worked on our tans while reading and listening to music. Brady was industrious and cleaned one of our refrigerators that was smelling less than fresh. Something defrosted over the last few days and left a pool of water at the bottom. This seems to have activated some previous unknown spill and turned the bottom of the fridge into some sort of a chemistry experiment, complete with it's own new and original smell. Thank you Brady! Dinner was some kind of stew concoction that Brady came up with consisting of canned ravioli, canned mushrooms, canned tomatoes, and potatoes. Interesting but good. We had a double feature tonight! Encino Man was our first screening followed by Scary Movie 2. Encino Man was as awesome as I remembered it. Let's just say that Scary Movie 2 was less than awesome.

My embarrassing moment of the day was when Brady double checked our way points and found that I had put the right numbers in for longitude, but hadn't paid attention to the meridian where East and West longitudes meet. We're basically a stones throw from the meridian and I plotted a point on the West side when it should have been East. Soooo, we sailed a little too far West and now have to sail upwind and to the East to get back on course. Oh well, live and learn. What's a few more hours of sailing?

Less than 200 miles to Minerva and the forecast calls for steady winds. If all goes as planned we should make reef-fall Wednesday early morning (about 30 hours from now).