It was a sparkling night when I came up at 22:00 for my first three hour watch. The electric fish parade was extraordinary, glittering away from under our hull in disco flashes that caught my eye even as I was writing on the iPad. On the starboard beam was small galaxy of fellow WARC boats, the reassuring comfort of their twinkles making me smile. Above the WARC orbs, Orion and his hounds chased the hare across the black velvet turf of the sky. On our port side, the lone star of Niobe gleamed, gliding along under Alpha Centari and the Southern Cross. We were on a port tack, flying our code zero reacher, and about half the main sail, both sheeted in fairly tight, because the wind was mostly on the beam with a few wanderings now and then to the aft quarter. This using the big head sail at night was a first for us, we usually put it away before dark. Last summer, when our grand daughter, Kiersten was sailing with us in the stiff Baltic breezes, she gave the reacher a nick name of “the bull”, as it can be a bit boisterous or cantankerous as it comes in or goes out of the chute. Tonight, though, the wind is very light and variable, veering from the east south east to the east north east, and back again in a range of speed from three to seven knots. It is a perfect time to experiment with leaving the bull up and we are moving along at 6.5 knots of speed over ground, partly due to an excellent assist of favourable current. It feels so good to be sailing again on this first day and night of the journey to the Sweet Dream of French Polynesia.
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