04-Apr-2006 Position

13'06.9N/109'36.7W
04-Apr-2006

137nm made good last 24 hours. 620 Miles from Z-town!!!

I knew the winds we too good to last, we have been motor sailing since late yesterday afternoon. We tried everything we could not to run the engine. We tried running the jib off the main's boom. We tried the spinnaker until it tried to destroy itself beating around with barely no wind. So, motor we have.

Anyway, running the engine lets us make fresh water with the water maker. It makes a gallon an hour, so we have lots of fresh water. So showers and SPA day for "Team Sandpiper"!!

I think the engine likes to test me. The first day out of Z-town it ate the cooling impeller. That is really a lot of fun to replace at sea! Then yesterday the rear right engine mount decided to shear off, dropping the engine down about an inch. Somehow I was able to get the broken bolts out, install new bolts, and get the engine lifted back up. Nothing like working in a hot engine room near the equator!!

Amy and I are splitting up the night watches, 3 hours on/3 hours off. So far this has been working. During the day, whoever isn't tired stays up, and the other naps.

The big tuna boats that work this far offshore have helicopters on board for spotting fish. We had one circle us yesterday. They almost look like a toy as they are so small. They just hold the pilot and have 2 small floats on the bottom of them. It was weird to see a helicopter this far out. But they were probably saying the same thing about us!

Amy cooked up some delicious banana bread today with our bananas that were getting a little mushy. Today we are trying to see if a fish wants to bite our hooks.

Don, on the SSB radio net this morning, is promising us winds tomorrow. So hopefully we can get some free miles. We left Z-town with 190 gallons of diesel, which is more that other boats out here have. But some wind would be really nice.

I am not sure what the delay time is for posting on our blog site. It works something like this:
(1) We write up our noon position reports and other emails and try to get them out via our SSB radio late afternoon. But this is all depending on the atmospheric conditions, as sometimes the radio does not like to connect. We are transmitting to an antenna in Texas.

(2) Then my brother Ron gets our email in Perth Australia. He updates the blog from the email information.

So, why am I telling you all this? Even though these are our noon reports, there is delay in all this. So I am sure that it is many hours later that this all get posted on our BLOG. So family and friends, please don't fret, as there are a lot of factors on us getting an email out. There might be times where it could take days or longer for us to get a clear connection with the radio to send and receive. And then Ron could be napping, or be on a hot date.

Note from Ron: I try to get the Sandpiper updates posted to the blog as soon as I can. It takes me about 15 minutes to do everything. However, I am going camping and hiking at Uluru (aka Ayres Rock) over Easter week. I will be trekking in the middle of Australia's red center with no computer access.