Passage Panama to French Polynesia, day 17, Wednesday 5-Apr:
It was a superb day sailing today. All day two-sail reaching with main and spinnaker. 115deg off the wind doing 7-9kts in 12-16. Amazing that we can be going faster than the apparent wind in the sails! On deck it just feels like a gentle 7-8kts breeze, yet our 30 tons is ploughing along through relatively calm. This is the kind of Pacific sailing we signed up for!
Middle of the day we cruised quite quickly passed 2 other sailing boats, who were apparently boat buddying. We had a rather long VHF chat to one of them. You’d think the guy hadn’t spoken to another human for months. I think he hardly took a breath between sentences! One of the two had Starlink and just before sunset each day they would sail within 50m metres of each other to share WiFi! Boy-o-boy see how ocean sailing has changed in just 1 year! Last year we were struggling to download one email in 15 minutes using the SSB HF radio, and this year we can stream Netflix! Starlink is amazing.
At sunset, with winds now gusting 17-18 and forecast to stay like that till daybreak, we took the spinnaker down for the night. But after sunset the wind settled back down, and I spent the entire evening itching to put it back up again. But I sat on my hands this time!
