High Noon... Wine with dinner day!

Sunday, July 3rd
Ship's Log

Lat 6 degrees 20 min S

Lon 139 degrees 57 min W
Cathy writes:

We have just come through a very tumultuous night of one squall after another rolling through which made for a very noisy violent ride all night (with calm in between which allowed us to fall back to sleep between squalls). The good news is that we stayed right on course (thanks to crew members Monti and Tilly and particularly Cap'n Billy who set up the perfect sail combo and trim).

We knew that we would have to tack to be able to head on a good course for Atuona, Hiva Oa ... our destination in the Marquesas. It seems weird that we are now heading ENE!!! All instincts scream out NOOOOOOOOooooo... WRONG WAY! But our (read Billy's) careful planning shows clearly that we need to do this tack (oh my gosh! one tack in three weeks!! - just not used to all this activity!!).

We have decided to put on the engine for a couple of hours so that our freezer unit will do it's work freezing numerous bottles of freshly filtered fresh water so that we can keep our necessary foodstuffs (read beer!!) nice and cold even with the refrigerator unit turned off (it powers only through the boat engine running)! Makes for a very noisy and deisel smelling ride but oh so worth it in the end.

We are doing very well and have contacted our 'people' (Pacific Yacht Services that dave and Rhonda Mancini put us on to - yet again another HUGE thanks to Dave and Rhonda!!). Our PYS point person is Laurent on Tahiti who is guiding us through all the eport entry paper work, accessing duty-free fuel etc. and we will be contacting Sandra also of PYS (VHF Channel 11) as we approach Atuona. Having them there waiting for us is an absolute blessing... so nice to know that there are people expecting us to show up! We are also thankful to Dan and Alice who told us about the Pacific Seafarers Net for whom I prepare a report for each night at 0300 Zulu time (8pm BC PST) and they enter all of our particulars into a database that is available for others to use (you may want to check out Yotreps as that is one place that our nightly report goes to - search by our vessel name SV Terrwyn or our call sign VE0WCN - and 0 is the digit zero...).

That's it for now...