orca 3 and the big blue sea

orca 3 current position 31* 27S 152* 45W doing a whopping almost 4 knots....................

yes boys and girls we have round 3 of the big winds! at 7pm last night winds were 30 knots gusting to 34. at 2am mine and Marg's Malachi watch ( we have the same watch so we can chat) winds were 32 knots and we had some gusts!! this is supposed to stay with us all day and into the evening then winds are 35-40! so that makes what 3 gales!! orca 3 is riding the waves and winds well! this is good. we all are very tired , sore muscles and using ones never even knew we had! its a challenge walking up hill while the boat rocks I tell ya! salt spray everywhere, including coming in my galley hatch cause I left it oh so slightly open, lesson learned, we sure took a lot of water in that one., I was wiping it up all over the counter, floor, wall ,ceiling - even got a bit on my bread, but hey now the galley is all clean!! thats the upside..... hahaha
so what does that telll ya when the wind eases to 25 knots and it fells like 6! we be seasoned sailors then I guess

lots of sleeping going on here, and we are all anxious to get to land, this has been a very tiring crossing, not as long as from mexico to marqueses although same distance in miles but we've sailed faster of course. Just talked to Malachi and we all can't wait to go swimming! we have 500 miles to go! getting there.

Well not much else to say, to rocky down here anyway, gotta get outside! hope you all are enjoying where you are, take care and this will be Orca 3 clear from this station


April 29,2009
hello hello,
this sucks!We all feel this way, steady 35 knots , waves 3-4 meters. rain rain rain, salt everywhere and even have found a few leaks never had before. have had a few more dumps of water through the solar vent. we got the cap out but never got it capped off in time. We are under staysail alone and doing 4-5 knots the up side is it should all be calming sometime between 6 am and noon today ( its 4 am now)
we are all feeling not to well, seasicky, Malachi is finally back in VHF range - lost them for about 7 hrs. they have been hand steering the last few hours as the autopilot has decided to take a break. both of us are running our main engines to charge batteries as the generators are getting airlocks , lots of heal on the port side,

this has been one tough passage - boat doing okay - we buried the top handrail about half a dozen times during the day- scared me it did!! I don't like that. we've had some good breaking waves too. sounds like we hit something each time. but we didn't.

429 miles to go and counting! looking forward to being anchored and not moving!

orca 3 over and out