After four days at sea we’ve got just 1440 nautical miles to go. Not quite half way. The last 24 hours had been Unsailboat weather: very light airs and a couple of long period swells that would be rolling us around in Beowulf or Sundeer. We’ve been running at a steady 11 knots on the GPS. Making easy miles while we can.

Looking at the fax charts late yesterday, there was a chance we’d sneak through without any more significant head winds, but this morning’s GFS model run has us in 15 to 20 knots of breeze, from the northeast, for two of the next five or six days.

There is an intense low pressure systems to our northeast. We wish it was a little closer so we could have the southwesterly circulation off its bottom to push us along. However, it is too far away and moving too fast to make it worth chasing. We are essentially sailing the great circle route between here and the coast.

What is interesting about the northwesterly swells is that there are two or maybe three sets of these, probably from different low pressure systems. Once in a while they superimpose on each other and become really big. They would be wonderful for surfing if we had a bit of breeze to use. But their shape is too soft for us to go over the lip and drop in with Wind Horse. Maybe when we approach the coast we’ll get some rides.

We’ve been taking advantage of the calm conditions for long bubble baths, and showers. Compared to the olden days, when we used to wash with salt water and rinse with a quick douse of fresh, this is really luxurious.

Dinner last night was chicken mole, made and then frozen while we were in American Samoa. The salsa, chips, tortillas, and veggies are from Hawaii.

Of course we’ve still got lots of supplies from New Zealand in the freezer. This berry tart was the result. But there was a problem. What we thought was whipping cream turns out to be something else. So we were forced to substitute Rice Dream (non-dairy ice cream) for whipped cream. Bummer.

Just so you don’t feel too sorry for us, roughing it out here on this long passage, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve got a good inventory of movies to watch. The TV is set up with picture-in-picture so we can have the radar image in one corner. But so far we’ve just kept the radar on its own monitor (which you can see on the nav desk behind Linda). Considering we did not even have a TV on our previous boats, this is quite an advance (or a huge amount of corruption, depending on your view). The flat screen TV shown here lives behind the settee when not in use.

Now that we are wearing long sleeves and pants, we’ve finished stripping Wind Horse of her awnings. No sense in having them up in this part of the world. They are subjected to wear and tear and create additional windage. And if the weather gets weird, which we do not expect right now, it is one less thing to worry about.

Speaking of weather phenomena, our barometer has been reading around 1020 to 1021mb the last 16 hours, with a light westerly wind. The surface analysis faxes from yesterday showed that we should be under the influence of higher pressure – more like 1023mb. As we corrected both barometers before leaving Honolulu (something we do before every passage) we are pretty sure we’ve got a frontal influence.

A few minutes ago in came this surface fax. We’re at roughly 31 degrees north latitude and 145 degrees west longitude.

Above is a cropped portion of the same fax. Find the 20 (which stands for 1020mb) on the isobar in the bottom left, and then go just above the black horizontal line, and that’s our position. Notice the cold front off the low to our north.

Here is the radar, set on 24-mile range. Those squall lines shown to the left of the screen tie to the fax chart and the cold front it depicts. The pressure we’re seeing also now ties to the surface analysis.

This is what that squall line looks like. We will probably get a nice fresh-water wash-down before long. Now, if we could just have some strong westerly quadrant pressure to use for a bit of surfing.

The difference between what we were seeing yesterday and the fax charts happens from time to time. In this case, it is not a problem. But if we were in a blow, or facing something nasty, we like to be able to confirm what the forecasters are telling us with what we see on board. If there is a discrepancy, like we had yesterday, we always go with an analysis based on our onboard observations. We know those are right!