It's 2:30am on Tuesday morning. While I wrote earlier that the squalls had thinned out, they did not go away entirely. The last 24hrs they were very active as we played a game of "whack-a-squall". Similar to the "whack-a-mole" game, the squalls appear on the radar at random times and locations. One minutes the screen is blank and it's smooth sailing, the next it looks like pimples on a 13year old. Then they morph, grow, shift and generally flow with the direction of the wind. And occasionally they make a direct hit on us and we get a fresh water rinse.
The fresh water rinse is nice, the rest of the experience is not. The squalls are local areas or low pressure. Our "normal" wind we also call the "gradient" wind because it's speed is determined by the slope of the high pressure mountain I described yesterday. But the squalls are a local low pressure (not a low that is 1,000 miles away) so the slope is very steep which accelerates the wind. Additionally, it bends to the left (counter clockwise) in the process. So every squall presents us with a cycle that includes a couple of changes in wind direction and a couple of changes in wind speed. This necessitates changes in the sail configuration and course, basically a lot of activity just to cope with the squall that doesn't add anything to our overall progress. Sometimes the wind really jumps, like from 12 to 28, in just a minute or two which creates a lot of scrambling around to reduce sail area and course. At 76.5F, the water has not cooled much since we departed Hawaii. But soon it will drop at least 20 degrees to the mid 50's and the squalls will be gone.
When the weather was nice for a few hours on Sunday Paul and I were both able to take a shower on deck at the back of the cockpit which was a refreshing break. We hope to get another in a day or two when motoring in the high.
Tonight the moon rise was straight out of Hollywood. It was almost a caricature of the moon, something from the set of One From the Heart or a Broadway play back drop. The pale yellow moon rose right up from the ocean, leaning at about 45 degrees with a cloud nestled in the arc. It's a sight we rarely see on land because we're not usually up and outside at 3am!
