Agua Dulce - Log Day 9 - I think we've found the trade winds!

We’ve been sailing with the spinnaker during the day for 3 days now in NE winds from 10-15 knots. This feels like what we expected it to be like sailing in the trade winds to the Caribbean. The seas and swells are regular – not confused or crazy big. And the weather has been sunny and warm as well. I’m sure we will run into some squalls along the way, but I’ll take that over motoring non-stop any day!

We haven’t fished for a few days, but this morning when I went up for my 7am watch, I did find four flying fish on the deck. They had “flown” onto the deck during the night and, unfortunately, left some of their blood and guts behind. I found one perilously close to Charles’ open hatch in our cabin. It would have been hilarious if it had flown in and landed on him in the middle of the night – no such luck though.

It’s getting harder to hear the different boats on our daily SSB chat now. That tells me that the rally boats are getting more and more spread out. I’m learning a lot about propagation and which frequencies bounce higher in the atmosphere and back to boats that are farther away. We usually have to relay positions from the farthest boats to the net controller because we’re not all in range now.

We haven’t seen any sailboats in the past 2 days, and we’ve only seen two big boats (a cargo ship and a tanker) in the last 48 hours. It makes for very quiet and uneventful watches, but the stars are beautiful, and I’m starting to judge where we are heading by looking for Orion in the night sky.

Chicken pasta is on the menu for dinner tonight. We are eating at 7pm now, and it is still light outside. When we began, it got dark before 6:30pm. It’s staying light later with each passing day, but that also means it is getting light later in the morning as well. The sunrises have been lovely, but we’re still watching for the green flash at sunset!