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Spooky Night

It's been another quiet day at sea. The only real sounds have been the steady hum of the engine and the occasional, hopeful flap of the headsail whenever we think the wind might be picking up enough to give it a go. Spoiler alert: its only occasionally.

However, the sunset and moonrise were anything but ordinary. The moon was really red, and I kept glancing at it, wondering what was going on as it clearly wasn't behind a cloud. Then, one side started to brighten, and a lightbulb went off in my head: "Hmm, looks like an eclipse." Turns out, I was right! It's quite the coincidence, finding out later that it was indeed a lunar eclipse. Its easy to see why 200 years ago they would have been reaching for a box of matches, firelighters and the nearest virgin. A nice moment in an otherwise uneventful day. I am definitely not complaining, as when things are getting exciting at sea, it's normally very close to something going wrong, and my intention is to have uneventful passages.

We're approaching that point, after several days of light winds, where I have to start inventing things to pad out these blog posts. When the sea is this calm, there's not a whole lot to write about. It's looking as though we will have similar conditions right the way through to Port Vila, which is now only 800nm away. We did 137nm in 24 hrs yesterday with a mix of motor-sailing whenever the wind picked up enough to get the headsail out, and just running on one engine. So, I am aiming to get into Vila before next weekend – Thursday would be great, but I will settle for Friday. This is definitely very economical miles and I am sure we aren't even using 2.5 liters an hour, the current will be giving us perhaps 15nm a day for free and a few more from the breeze to help top off the average.

Hopefully, we'll get some more wind soon, and I'll have more unexciting tales to tell. Until then, I'll try to spot some more celestial surprises.


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