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Monday, February 14, 2011

HI to MX Day 32

This is really too good to be true. Yesterday was a nice day in spite of having to motor all afternoon. It got very clear and calm by the end of the day and John announced good potential for a green flash sunset. Sure enough that last blip of sun turned bright green. Unfortunately John will never know what one looks like since he's slightly color blind.

John shut the engine off at 8 PM and he furled the jib and hoisted the spinnaker an hour later, just in time for my watch. Aside from a few hours early this morning we've been flying it ever since, and have been cooking along at about five knots. There's been some wind chop coming down from the Sea of Cortez to give us a bit of a roll now and then, but otherwise it's a very smooth ride.

The entire night and all of today have been almost eerily crystal clear without a speck of cloud in the sky, for the first time of the entire passage. It's just surreal. And warm! The sea surface temperature rose to 70 degrees at Noon yesterday and has been in the low seventies since then. The only downside to that is that we've lost the beautiful indigo blue of open ocean and now the water is a greener brown that we associate with coastal cruising.

Lots of voice traffic on the VHF today with ships calling port control somewhere. John heard cruising boats hailing the marina in La Cruz (near Puerto Vallarta) so he tried giving Sarana a call, but no joy there. I even heard a boat calling El Cid marina in Mazatlan.

We ate our last chicken breast today and have one package of hamburger left in the freezer. John's had both fishing lines out, but so far has caught only a piece of plastic.

Almost forgot - we took fresh water showers in our head yesterday. How fantastic is that on top of everything else?!

Just a little over 200 miles to go as I write this!

Linda

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