Current position as of 0000 UTC July 23rd is 43° 10’ N 144° 27’ W Current Heading: 38°M Total distance made good (DMG) = 1646nm DMG last 24hrs (0000UTC-0000UTC) = 132 nm Engine hours = 4.75 Avg true wind speed (TWS) = 12.5 kts Avg speed over the ground (SOG) = 5.8 kts Avg swells = 2.6 ft Recap of Day 18 Another sign of changing waters when we started the day off right with a gorgeous 15lb Albacore Tuna, the cedar plug wins again and shows it with teeth marks all over this little lure that could. We made up another batch of pita bread that had been frementing in the fridge for the last few days and had some tasty lunch meat sandwiches with our canned beetroot and sprouts. We have noticed a low charge on our batteries the last few days and are trying to narrow down the draw and seem to think it might be either the fridge or the autopilot that seems to drop our batteries to dangeriously low levels during the night. We ran the engine for a number of ours while under sail to get a charge going and also used this time to run the watermaker for a couple of hours without straining the batteries, we do have AGM batteries on Varuna which we would not go with again even though they are great we don’t think they are worth the added cost. Discussing batteries is like asking people what kind of pizza is best and you will get way to many opinions, basically it depends on what use you will get and where you are going. So many are quick to disregard old style flooded lead acid batteries these days especially with the rise of lithium but you really can’t argue the cost advantage of lead acid over any other battery type and the ease of access in other parts of the world, good luck getting AGM’s in Central America. We really like lithium for the low impedence that can let us charge all the way up without a slow down absorption cycle but to be honest we wouldn’t go with lithium unless we got an extremely good deal. They just are not worth the dollars at this point in our view. Enough about batteries, we can discuss that in detail some other time but here on day 18 we got peek at the sun for a brief period and the winds have really started moving now. Very steady 13-19kts out of the NNW and moving us along to get our best mileage in weeks and even furled the genoa and put a reef in the main. We have had the windvane on steering all day since the battery top up and it is holding well just forward of the beam, we also passed another ship heading to Manzanillo, MX. The night is cool now and we are in warm clothes and blankets in our bunks but the cabin is staying quite pleasant, I had to harness in up on the bow through the night to retie our jerry cans which had come loose and were sliding around and Hillary had another boat pass behind us heading to LA on her watch. We are seeing lots more traffic now and it feels good to know they can see us on AIS and not just the other way around, but the conditions really don’t compare to last trip and we have had nothing like the fog we got back then. All that fog shows much farther west on our weather charts, we are preparing for some rougher days with strong winds coming with a low and probably a good amount of rain in the front in about 2 days time. Cheers, Ty & Hillary
