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4/3/2006 1:13:00 AM
630 miles outside Z town
South of waypoint 1005 ... we are still ahead of schedule

Day 5 of 25 - Get organized here

DAY 5 of 25 - Putting structure into our daily reports, sailing, boats, food, highs and lows.

OK, so I decided for my own sanity to get better organized and the daily logs are a start at that . up to this point it has been as someone called a 'stream of consciousness' writing style . whatever came to mind but going forward I will split it up into similar sections each day so you can skip the eating story for example if you are on a diet rather then happen to just run into it an expected turn of our email . ;-)

SAILING UPDATE

Day 5 was supposed to be the big day when we hit the trades . well NOT and since I cannot keep my mouth shut I had to make one of my cynical remarks on the net the weather guru Don is on . something to the effect of  "we are still looking for the promised trade winds" . which in return got me a good radio spanking by Don . what can I do but just bend over and take it . obviously NOT literally speaking. So no matter what, we had a decent night with the winds clocking around more and more to the north east which is the right direction but not the right strength yet, so the night was rolly and also the day so far has been a rolly kind of affair . our friends on Capaz are still in site of us and we talk to them all the time . are they sick of us yet . well at least they doing a fabulous job not letting it on or having excuses like we had the radio on the wrong channel.

The winds have been around 15 to 18 during the night and then between 8-12 knots in the morning . we are still hoping for trades to fill in but Don has now revised his forecast and added another 120 miles easting until we get there . hope he doesn't tell us the same story tomorrow but at least finally we got a few good hours of motoring in this morning because otherwise I need to open a gas station outside of Hiva Oa because I don't want to pay import taxes on the extra diesel I am bringing in.

BOAT UPDATE

Today I tackled the broken attachment of my windvane to the steering quadrant . I am not entirely happy with the repair but it should work for a while . looks like I will be looking for a welder in the Marquesas but since these are regular welds like they are done for any car and not stainless steel I should be able to get some replacement parts made for my autopilots . keep your fingers crossed or we will become experts at hand steering our boat soon . which we by the way did last night for a good portion . it was so much fun to hang out there, steer the boat at 7 - 8 knots boat spend and listen to John Mayer . stars, nice seas, nice winds, just a T-shirt, shorts and obviously a life jacket . it was heaven and I even let Niki sleep in a bit to my regret later on that night when I really got tired and had to nap pretty much for 4 hours between 10 and 2 during the day.

FISHING UPDATE

No fishing still . too much other food to eat . but again 1 dead flying fish and one squid. One that note, have you ever seen these flying fish, they do have their name for a reason because they come out of the water and truly fly for as much as 10 - 20 yards . looks totally cool. Too bad they are so small (about the size of a hand) so we cannot video tape them for future showing. Just imagine a little fish skimming along with wings over the water and then diving back into the water.

FOOD PLAN OF THE DAY

Breakfast - Oatmeal and tea

Lunch - Leftover Austrian meat balls called 'Faschierte Laberl'

Dinner - Barbecued pork chops and potato salad

HIGH OF THE DAY

This is a game we stole from a movie called 'The Story of Us' where the family sits together every day and gets to discuss their high and low of the day . we do it not every day but often enough and now I felt it made a good summary of the day. So here we go .

The high of today was that Ohana Kai almost caught up to us. They left about 20 hours behind us and now are only 4 hours back . they sailed their boat pretty hard the first 2 days when we slowed down due to the waves and swell so now we are starting to hear them even on VHF . the Pokemon net shall begin between the 6 boys.

LOW OF THE DAY

After fixing the attachment point I wasn't able to get the windvane working but that is probably a trim problem that I need to play with more tomorrow during the day.

OK, that's it for today. Hope you like the new format. Have a good one.

Happy voyaging,

TheSchmids Family Sailing on Lawur

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