Over the Date Line - October 11, 2012

Aloha 6th graders!

We had a good day of wind yesterday, averaging about 10 kts of speed.  The more speed we have, the harder it is to steer. Last night, during our watch, we had to change our head sail from the genoa (the largest) to the AP (middle sized).  There's one more, the staysail, which is even smaller.  We also had to reef, or make smaller, our mizzen, or back sail.  The canoe wanted to surf the swells behind us, but unfortunately, that was not putting us on our course.  This morning, we have very light winds from the southwest, and are moving at about 4 kts. Hikianalia was behind us last night, but has now passed us.  They are about 5 miles in front, and are very hard to see.  We keep in contact through radio and e-mail, comparing positions, weather conditions, the sails we are using, and what everyone had for lunch!  Just about half an hour ago, we passed over the international date line.  When I woke up, it was the 12th, and now we're back to the 11th.  Today is actually decently warm so far, so I think it will be a bath day.  It's been 4 days, but because it is too cold to sweat, we're not too stinky.  The worst thing is socks, because we are wearing rubber boots to keep our feet warm and dry and night. This morning for breakfast, we had bread, butter (very hard in the cold), jam and scrambled eggs and bacon...and of course Milo, which is like cocoa. 

We had small moments of excitement yesterday.  One was our captain, Titaua, losing the bathroom bucket overboard.  To use our toilet, you have to catch a bucket of sea water and pour it in to flush.  Well, the bucket broke off the rope and went floating off.  He made a new bucket, which was unfortunately about half the size, meaning that we had to double flush.  After he went to sleep, we made a new bucket.  Much better now.  Another bit of excitement is the multitude of small jellyfish or squid in the water.  They're small enough to see, but not large enough to really tell what they are.  Sort of makes you want to hold off on bathing for awhile. At night, we were treated to shooting stars...some raced across the sky while some glowed for a moment and burnt out.  Last night's skies were very clear and beautiful.  I stayed up about 2 hours past my watch to see Orion rise in front of us.  If you guys remember from 3rd grade Space Night, Orion's belt rises directly at east, 
which happened to be the direction we were holding.

We are also discovering that maybe we bought too much meat, and the crew got overfull of food, so last night's dinner was Chinese chicken salad and stir-fried veggies...something light to eat.  We need to make sure we take advantage of the fresh food we have before it starts to go bad. In fact, some of our lettuce was getting really slimy, so this morning, Fati and J-B cleaned out the produce cooler and dumped some lettuce overboard, leaving a green trail behind us.  We did notice a hungry seabird sitting on the water, apparently eating some of it.

I forgot to include our position with yesterday's report: at 6 am we were at 36 degrees 8 minutes S, 176 degrees 57 minutes E.  At 6 pm, we were at 35 degrees 48 minutes S, 178 degrees 48 minutes E.  At 6 am this morning, we were at 35 degrees 43 minutes S, 179 degrees 54 minutes E.
That's all for now -
Hope you all are well and entertaining Mrs. Reid with your World Religions presentations!

Ms. Fuller