July 2, 2008 - Darwin Dash, Day 5

We've been running wing on wing for the past few days. The wind has started to come forward, so Sten extended the whisker pole to hold the jib farther forward. He also put up the staysail. That thing hasn't been out of the bag in a very long time. It is a wrinkled mess.

We found some tomatoes and green peppers that were about to kick it, so we had western style scrambled eggs for breakfast. Then I counted up the eggs we had left and the number of miles to go and put the kabash on using any eggs in anything but baking.

Key Lime Custard

For the past few days we've been passing through the Coral Sea, which is bordered by Vanuatu and New Caledonia to the East, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to the North, and Australia to the West. After an amazing year, we've departed the Pacific Ocean. We might be sadder about having that storied body of water behind us, but the Coral Sea has been too welcoming to spend long reflecting on the Pacific. The sailing has been terrific, and we're catching more fish than we can eat. Before lunch we picked up two wahoo, but we still had some yellow fin left from yesterday, so we tossed them back. After another sushi lunch, we landed two more yellow fin. We kept one of them and released the other. While Sten was cleaning the yellow fin, he tossed the lines back in the water, to get them out from under foot. Within minutes, we had a skipjack on the line, flashing his electric blue back at us. We released him and hauled in the lines for the day.

Wahoo

This afternoon we made popcorn and watched some DVD's. During our night watches there was quite a bit of shipping activity showing up on the radar. Sten watched two ships pass each other about 16 miles away, then had to alter coarse to allow one of them to pass a mile ahead of us.