Tenth day out -The dichotomy of night and day

Some days are better than some nights. We had a great sail from noon until 9pm and another great sail from 6am to noon, but those hours in the dark were very trying last night.

Instead of blowing a nice 16-18 knots from about 45-50 magnetic (like it seems to do all day), the wind decided to drop to 8-10 and back all the way to 80-90 magnetic.

This wind angle meant we really had to sail wing and wind dead down wind but since it was night time, no one really wanted to wake someone else to get them up to help set the pole. Jean tried to go downwind without the pole and there was such a horrible noise I came up to see what was going on and we decided to run the motor. Then when I came on shift the wind was up to about 12-14kts but could not make up its mind on what direction it wanted to go so I ended up gybing three times on my own and loosing autopilot control once while I almost did a 360 in the complete dark with only the main up!

Because of all the messing around and less an ideal wind angle we only managed a straight line run of 140 miles, while we sailed closer to 150 miles with all our zip zags.

However, we did finally try fishing yesterday and true to Asunto form we got the fish on board only to be unprepared and lost it back overboard. It’s ok as it was a tiny (and I mean tiny) Mahi Mahi and would have only fed us a single meal if we had even decided to keep it.

I did get all the fishing stuff ready so that if we catch one today we’ll be having it for dinner!

Position update at 1200 local time April 1, 2016:
17 43.517 N
128 06.659 W
140 nautical mile noon to noon run
1726 nautical miles to destination
8.3 Kt. SOG
279 COG