S/V Acacia

The low point is that still no wind, actually less wind, we are currently motoring. Our hope is that we will be able to get far enough north to get out of the Pacific High. It’s not like we don’t like the sunny weather….

The high point was that we saw a ship and a whale today. The ship was sort of bulk cargo vessel going south. It’s AIS report said it was going to Los Angeles. Someone else in this big ocean.

The whale was a pilot whale. It was going parallel to us in the opposite direction. It was largely on the surface and spouted many times. Maybe it was also going to LA.

We saw many any birds and lots of flying fish today.

We continue to eat well. I made wild blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Last nights MahiMahi was excellant.

Bob

We got our email system working again. The problem turned out to be in the Acacia’s built in computer. After checking everything else, I switched to the backup computer. An Acer EeePC. Email is working again. Many thanks to Joel for showing me these small inexpensive laptops. Email is an important tool for us as we use it to get weather information and routing, as well as being to send out status reports like these. It’s great that it’s working again.

We are making some progress, but at the moment the wind has died. We made reasonable progress most of today in a good direction. We crossed the 35th latitude, a milestone of sorts. We hope that in the next few days we should get more wind from the NW so we can make better progress to our destination. On the HAM network, there is another boat north of that appears to be getting better winds.

Chris caught our third MahiMahi today. Calls were herd, MahiMani again…. We were all hoping for a Tuna. Since the winds have dropped off we will fire up the grill. We have some seafood rub onboard that we plan to try out.

At 17:20 HST we are located at 35 18.5 N , 154 00.9 W.

Bob

Moving slowly to the East. We tacked this morning as the old tack was starting to take us to Russia. We are hoping that we will finally get out of the Pacific High pressure zone that keeps the winds low and in the wrong direction. Probably in a few days. Once we get north of this, we should see winds that will push us to the North West.

The MahiMahi last night was excellent. It was bigger that the first one Chris caught and we will have the rest tonight for dinner. Not quite as fresh as last night, but still good!

The first half of the evening watch was calm, we ended up taking down all the sails and waiting for wind. It was frustrating waiting for the wind to pick up and stop the rolling. It did around midnight and we started moving again.

Bob
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At 9/3/2009 (utc) our position was 32°45.33′N 154°26.68′W

Wow, it’s now September.

The biggest event of the day just happened. Chris just caught a fish. Another MahiMahi. I think we will have fresh fish for dinner. I guess this is about a fresh as it gets! The winds have gotten very light about 15 minutes ago, so we may be able to grill it.

Not a lot to report otherwise. It’s been a quiet day. Still hot in the late morning and afternoon watches. This will probably change as we get further north.

We hope that once we get north of 35 degrees, the winds will change and allow to go north west, towards our destination. We will be able to tack. So far we have been on the starboard tack for most of the trip, it will be nice to use the other side of the boat. Until then, we will keep going in the general north direction as the winds allow.

That’s it for now.

Bob

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At 9/2/2009 (utc) our position was 32°24.19′N 154°57.56′W