Wind, Wind, Wind

As the saying goes, be careful what you ask for. We saw increasing winds from yesterday early morning and have been sailing in 25-30 knot SE winds for the past 26 hrs. We expect this to continue for the next day or two then ease back to 15 knots or so. We were running just aft of a beam reach with reefed mizzen and about half a headsail but decided to go more downwind this morning to ease the ride and dropped the mizzen. The wind steering is taking us along nicely and we are actually running quite flat just now. We are averaging 5 1/2 to 6 knots so are putting lots of miles under the keel. I am running a small controlled SSB net with Toketie, Rush and Elyios. We are all experiencing similar conditions. The difference is that Toketie is a 17 ton full keel steel cutter, Rush is a 35 foot catamaran and Elyios is 38 ft full keel cutter with a small child (2 year old) on board, makes for interesting choices. Everyone is OK, which is the main thing. The boats that headed north to Suwwarrov and Samoa are getting 35+ plus knots and at this point the swell and winds will stop people from getting into Suwwarrov as it's and Atoll and the pass will be treacherous in these conditions. We are running on course for Niue and if we continue at this rate will make it by Thursday AM next week at the latest. We are both getting lots of sleep as even sitting in the cockpit is a workout, not to mention the art of using the toilet in these conditions which I won't get into further. All movement is one hand for the boat and one hand for yourself. I had lots of fun this morning taking the mizzen down then going out to the foredeck to plug the hawse pipe (the hole the anchor chain goes through for you non-nautical types), and tie down the whisker pole. What's a whisker pole you ask, well, if you have a beard and the wind is blowing, you need to have this pole to hold on to on the boat due to the increased wind resistance on your face due to the beard. Not buying that explanation, OK, it's used to hold the headsail out when you are running deep downwind. Enough for now, must check the course and conditions again.

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