1700 hours. There’s a full moon, we’ve passed through the corner of the high, winds have moderated to a pleasant 15 knots, and Wind Horse is stretching her legs. We’ve both got on light clothing, and the heater has been turned off. In the interest of science we even ran the air conditioning for a while this afternoon – although we’re embarrassed to admit we’d do such a thing – and the forward cabin is back in use.

Forgot to mention in the previous report that we did 263 miles for the first 24 hours – and the same again for day two. Right on eleven knots. Today, with the wind backing to the south-southwest, and waves right on the stern, we’re learning to optimize downwind performance. Totally different, as you might expect, from Beowulf. On Wind Horse the ideal situation is wind and wave dead astern. Then, we need to pick a speed which keeps us on the wave faces as much as possible.

Increasing engine revs just 50 RPM (from 2100 to 2150) made a huge difference. Average speed is up about 10%, while exhaust gas temperature – which measures the work being done – has dropped significantly. So, we’re going way faster while using less fuel.

The waves are down to half the size of yesterday, averaging 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.4m) with the occasional 10-footer (3m) thrown in. We’ve been hitting speeds in the mid-teens with regularity. Record for the boat so far is…20 knots. And we caught 18.5 on the GPS with the digital camera – which we’ll publish in due course.

The surfing characteristics are totally different than our sailing designs, as you might expect. As the boat takes off on a wave, she naturally tends to pick a groove almost straight down the face of the wave. There is no tendency to round up. The faster we go, the straighter the alignment. That’s the aft location of the various fins plus some drag from the props at the higher speeds. It will be interesting to see this work in really big waves.

These characteristics lead to a different approach to weather routing. Whereas with Beowulf we’d work hard to keep the wind on the quarter, and avoided running dead downwind at all costs, with the new boat we want just the opposite. With our present weather pattern this ends up with our sagging off to the east a bit, keeping the wind and waves well aft. Distance to the east will pay benefits as the counterclockwise circulation pattern around this high turns into southeast tradewinds a day hence. Once in the southeasterly breeze, we’ll run back to port, maintaining a deep wind/wave angle in the new wind system. Anyway, something different for us to work with and keep the neurons snapping.

We spent some time on the flying bridge today. Very pleasant. Tomorrow will be even more so with the decrease in latitude (present position is 26 degrees South, 178 degrees East).

And the race is on to see if we can match Beowulf‘s performance between Fiji and New Zealand. She did the trip in four days and six hours, if our memory is correct. We’re on target to match that figure – although we’re optimizing for ambiance and weather rather than pure speed.

Dinner is about to be served in the main saloon, so we’d better sign off for now.