I had composed in my mind a whole blog entry on weather and why so many of these entries go on and on about weather. But I've spent the last hour and a half coping with a very large squall that totally pre-empted my time. Seems to be the story of this passage, never more than a few hours without a weather change. So this will be short.
Our noon to noon yesterday was 180nm. We had a squally morning, then a good afternoon. We actually decided to slow down this afternoon, we shortened sail, since our ETA was about 1am on Thursday and I don't want to enter the marina at night. The early evening was also nice with a brilliant moon and fairly clear sky. But a large squally area on the radar about 30 miles away slowly came to dominate the rest of the evening. Dan is now coping with the squalls and I'm ready for some sleep. The weather discussion will wait until tomorrow.
We may be able to see the big island by late tomorrow afternoon if there isn't too much cloud cover. About 370nm to go. We plan to motor through the lee of the big island (it creates a very large wind shadow) so we'll adjust our motoring speed to time our arrival in Honolulu for first light.
While dealing with the squall there was a spectacular moon set as the moon dipped below the cloud cover for about 20 minutes before dropping into the ocean. Nice.
