Wet

We've been motoring for the last 24hrs, but during the squalls we've tried to opportunistically sail to take advantage of the big winds, usually sustaining 20-30kts for an hour or so. This netted a noon to noon run yesterday of 184 miles. But for the last 12hrs or so the squalls have had no big wind, just lots and lots of rain. In between the heavy rain in the squalls is lighter rain and no wind so that New Morning is now pretty much salt free. We've also now encountered the equatorial counter current which runs west to east, pushing us away from Hawaii at over 1kt. I'm anticipating the combination of counter current and no wind means that today's run will show a very slow 24hrs.

As I mentioned yesterday, Fay confirmed that the only place to get the main repaired was in Honolulu at North Sails. That changed our destination from Kona to Honolulu. Then I spent a lot of time studying the forecasts this morning and found that we were traveling in our own ITCZ weather system. As we moved north, it moved north. The NE trades were always a couple of days out of reach, most recently at 13N, far north of their usual location.

After using MaxSea to work out the course alternatives, it became clear that we should abandon the plan to go north until we reached the trades and instead turn towards Honolulu immediately. If the forecasts are reasonably accurate we should hit the trades earlier and still have a good sailing angle for the last 700 miles, though we'll probably need to motor a few hours when we're in the lee of the big island. So we turned this morning and now have about 930 miles to Oahu, including an estimated 240 miles of motoring before we reach the NE trades. This is so much more motoring that we anticipated, but New Morning has plenty of fuel so it's not a problem, just less enjoyable than sailing.

With lots of cloud cover this is another black night, though I do see a morning star poking through the clouds near the horizon, but I don't know if it's Mars or Venus. In either case it is very bright.