Day 15 to Hawaii

Noon position 4/17/16: 19 55.1469 N 136 05.9576 W
Noon to noon distance travelled: 114 nm
Total distance travelled: 1808 nm
Distance to Hilo: 1078 nm

We are now in a new time zone, another milestone reached. Whew! The noon to noon distance travelled above is 25 hours due to the new time zone.

As I came on watch at 2:00 this morning, the wind had died, so we pulled the sails down and cranked on the motor. I know the batteries were happy, and I was too to be making some miles. The wind just came up again, and we are sailing slowly again. Looks like we might be able to just skirt the edge of the no wind patch instead of being snack dab in the middle of it, we are glad to have been able to make miles when we did.

There is a children's book called The Dawn Watch that our family loves. It tells the story of a little girl sailing across Lake Superior overnight with her family. When it is time for the dawn watch, she joins her father. She's responsible for looking out for ships or other obstructions. While her father goes below and leaves her on deck with the autopilot driving the boat, her imagination goes a little wild and she sees sea monsters and pirate ships. Soon her father comes back on deck with hot cocoa and they watch the sunrise. Lars and Odin have been very intrigued to replicate her experiences on our boat, so this morning I woke Lars for the dawn watch. He woke up immediately, and as I was helping him into his warm clothes, he said "my legs are just wobbling because I'm so excited." His grin was from ear to ear and we had a lovely time, hot cocoa included. Odin's turn tomorrow. Precious memories indeed.

I took advantage of the calm conditions this morning to make some bread dough with Lars. Yum, fresh baked bread! We even made 2 batches so one can go in the fridge to be baked later, a new strategy, hope it works. I hope we will get showers later if the sun shower heats up. And we are just enjoying comfortable motion in the boat, even if we aren't moving very quickly.