Tuesday, June 16

The last couple of days have been pretty uneventful, sunny and quiet. We caught another fish or two and did some swimming and lots of reading. We're just a few hundred miles from Hawaii now, and Clive, our bird friend seems to have abandoned us. I'll miss him. We spent a fair amount of time last night snacking on popcorn and trying to identify constellations and planets, but none of us are very good at it. We think we found Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and possibly even Pluto. Or maybe they were airplanes. I'm only confident about the Big Dipper.

We have a system called AIS that detects other boats, and often, we can look up details about the boats -- what kind of boats they are, where they're coming from, where they're headed. It also broadcasts our details to others. Last night, we spotted a thousand-foot cargo ship a few miles away, headed straight toward us on their way to Beijing. They didn't appear to see us, so we dropped our sails and changed course to avoid them. When the coast was clear, we hoisted the sails again and corrected our direction. A couple of hours later, I came out to check the AIS on schedule and spotted a boat a few miles away. I looked up the details and saw that it was a thousand-foot cargo ship on its way to Beijing. Because its course was on a straight line with ours, I woke Jason so we could drop the sails to avoid them. He pointed out that it was the same boat we'd already avoided, only now it was headed directly away from us. Perhaps I'm not all that valuable as a middle-of-the-night watcher. Maybe they'll let me skip my turns from now on.

Because the trip has taken us longer than we expected, we're going to skip our planned stop at Hilo and go directly to Honolulu, where the crew who's bring Pensive home will meet us. We expect to arrive on Friday morning and then, with luck, be back in Seattle sometime over the weekend.

After a rough start, the last part of the trip has really been fantastic. I think we all feel a little bittersweet about its coming to an end. It's going to be a hard act to follow!

Last night's dinner was pasta with white clam sauce, tonight's is chicken paprikash and broccoli.