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3/31/2006 8:19:00 PM
300 miles outside of Z town
Halfway between waypoint 1002 and 1003 slightly south of our course

Day 3 of 25 - We are slowly but surely settling in

DAY 3 of 25 - Finally after 3 days it seems we found our rythm and are adjusting to our surroundings

Well it is day 3 and it seems we are getting into the groove of things. Niki and I take naps during the day, my seasickness and mostly for the boys too has gone away . only Niki is feeling squeezy at times still . poor girl.

Day 2 has been a pretty lousy one from a feeling perspective but actually from a sailing perspective we had a pretty good day . we do this thing every day with the kids where we write down our position, miles, average wind speed and average boat speed and while we only sailed 110 miles on our first day, we did a respectable 143 miles the second, which is an average of 5.9 knots. So here is my new challenge for the trip . what's the largest 24 hour miles run I can achieve while my family still feels OK . so far it is 143 and we are counting from our depature time 8am to 8am the next day.

Finally yesterday after my afternoon nap I started to feel better and my high of the day was to take a quick wash with a wash cloth . can you imagine how something that simple can become the highlight of my day . LOL. Well as I have written before, the weather is VERY WARM and it is sticky down below, so we are all sweating a bit so taking a cool cloth and washing down is almost as good as a cool shower . but just almost . friends of us on their brand new Island Packets must be laughing their heads off . they can take showers whenever they feel like it.

Beside it being hot, the wind has been blowing VERY CONSIST which is kind of unusual for this area . most people leaving from Z town to the Marquesas end up motoring for the first 2-4 days . all we had to do so far for the most part is top of our batteries with running the engine. As a result we are conserving diesel and we can use it at a later point in time, which is nice especially with the thread of having to charge more due to our autopilot sucking lots of juice. We just started to turn off our computer for the better part and only turn it on every hour or two. That way we don't need to run the inverter and we can save a lot of energy too. This might also cut a bit into our email time but we should be still doing OK at least with our daily reports like this one.

From a sailing perspective, Lawur has done marvelous. We are keeping pace with 2 much larger boats and my early conclusion on how fast you go and how long it takes to get there has much less to do with the boat but much more with how much you are willing to take . as a point in time, our friends on Ohana Kai who sail a Catalina that in most people's opinion should sail slower then me, has done in their first day over 170 miles, but they had the rail buried in the water most of the way. On the other hand, we took a more leisure approach especially the first night when it got really rolly and slowed down quite substantially just to be able to get some sleep. So, it ain't the boat so much as it is the people on it . yes I admit it we are wimps and I am proud of my wimpy family!!!!

Have I told you yet how blue the ocean is . wow this is totally amazing, the color of the water and the fact that there is still birds flying around us . where do they come from? Where do they sleep? We are now over 300 miles off-shore, a mere 2640 miles to go, which I guess means we are 10% there. The kids are entertaining themselves quite a bit since Niki and I keep quite busy doing watches, checking the boat, checking the wind, checking the course, checking into radio nets . there is stuff to do, believe it or not. At around 4pm, we are trying to have a happy hour with the kids every day. The first day we played Mexican Domino and had a soda for a treat. Yesterday, with all of us laying around sick, happy hour got cancelled . I expect today we are on again.

No updates on the mechanical front of the windvane, since I had no time yet to dig through my nuts and bolts box but rather sent you guys an email. Maybe tomorrow I get a chance to look into that issue a bit more.

So back to sailing. Happy voyaging,

TheSchmids Family Sailing on Lawur

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