Wed Sept 22 - Day 7 Enroute to Hawaii

Position: 03deg57minN/141deg22minW
Day 6 run: 113 nm
Avg speed: 4.7 kn
Winds went very light during the night, hence our speed dropped and overall 24 hour run as above. We gybed over to port tack earlier this morning to gain some westing, and will gybe back later this afternoon to achieve more north direction. Tomorrow some time we should be able to once again gybe back to port tack and hold it more or less to Hilo. We'll have to dodge whatever storm cells pop up, play the wind shifts and motor thru the calms. We carry plenty of diesel but hope to sail for the most part. Right now we're doing about 6+/- knots with just our yankee jib poled out and the steering vane is doing it's job, which is pretty decent considering we're steering just about dead down wind, a point of sail most vanes are notoriously cranky about. We've decided to name our steering vane Max. Sue says he's got one of the most important jobs aboard. Oh yeh, I forgot to mention that sometime during the night we broke the shear pin on Max's vane rudder. If the shear pin breaks, the rudder will swing up (kind of like a Hobie cat's rudder); we don't know what we hit, and didn't hear anything, but obviously something serious enough to shear a 10mm nylon bolt! I replaced it with a SS bolt, but will get the proper 10mm nylon one once we're in Oahu. Max is doing fine.

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