Current position as of 0000 UTC July 26th is 46° 18’ N 136° 47’ W Current Heading: 50°M Total distance made good (DMG) = 2029 nm DMG last 24hrs (0000UTC-0000UTC) = 120 nm Engine hours = 0 Avg true wind speed (TWS) = 15 kts Avg speed over the ground (SOG) = 5.5 kts Avg swells = 5.5 ft Recap of Day 21 It is our belief that as durable and sea worthy a boat is when you start placing them in constant movement in trying conditions that things will break, maintaining all the little things that fail along a passage is a way of life. These situations add stress to an already sleep deprived crew (us) and you don’t want to be thinking about the cascading effect the failure could have on the entire journey (but you do). With our battery issue we have been trouble shooting we have run the engine more than usual but maybe only a few hours every few days to top up the batteries, unfortunately this morning we had a low oil pressure alarm go off and I stuck my head in the engine room while Hillary shut everything down. I saw a very oil misted cloud and oil spurting everywhere! My best hope was this would be a hose issue but of course it would be much worse, I spent time accessing the engine through our tiny access hole under the galley sink when I was able to find toda giant gaping hole in the engine with a piece missing. This looked the diameter of a ball poiint pen, thank goodness this plug may have come out from the rough seas and a very full (maybe overfull?) resivour. Varuna was kind to us however and the oil plug was located with relative ease under the engine in the bilge, we are counting our lucky stars and after some engine clean up to catch all the sprayed oil we got everything back running smoothly againe. The weather today has died off much sooner than we expected and I think the low probably heading more northeast sooner than expected. The rain continued and soaked everything and we fired up our little used propane cabin heater to take out some of the chill and help dry some of the clothes. We have been eating so much Tuna it is incredible and we still have three more containers in the fridge, we gave up fishing a few days again when we just kept catching Albacore. For now the Pole is up on the starboard side and the wind is lmost directly behind us, the conditions are very rolly and the sails flog quite a bit from the large swells but we are making great progress now. Cheers Ty & Hillary
