Equator Eludes Us

The wind continues to blow lightly from a little east of south. With the spinnaker up we can’t point as close to the wind, so while we’re making progress west, we aren’t really moving south towards the better weather. Still, the big waves are slow and comfortable, enough so that we felt comfortable re-gluing a big section of carpet yesterday afternoon.

The wind died completely right around sunset, and we socked the spinnaker, but left it hanging, ready to go back out. It’s not going to blow away. Then we motored south for an hour and a half, nominally to recharge the batteries but also to cancel out a night of drifting north.

The spinnaker came back out a little before 1am; it feels weird to be excited about six knots of wind. So we sailed more of the night than yesterday, making progress west but getting further from the equator. Meanwhile everything outside gets covered by a surprisingly heavy coat of dew. Laundry would be easy in these conditions, but it would never dry.

And now we’ve returned to our regular cutter rig, to get closer to a sightly stronger wind. A pod of dolphins passed in the distance as we changed sail, but we remain uninteresting to them.

2507 miles left on the rhumb line.

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