you are NOT here

Well, we're here, got it at about 4. The wind gave up an the current came back at about midnight. We motored in at about 4am. Praying the engine wouldn't run out of fuel as we cut the corner over uncharted bottom at 2.5 knots against the tide.

You can tell we're in the Pacific islands proper now. The chart says we're anchored on land. Coming in last night was interesting, fortunately we had the Radar. Which told us that the shore that looked closer than it should be was closer than it should be.

Fortunately there was a moon. Since the wind died completely a few nights back, the stars have been fabulous. I've been using a little program called "Stelarium" to look about.

No no not the cold probe!

With this program I was also able to identify Alan's UFO. To be fair, the thing was flashing different colours. It looked like a carousel in the sky. In fact it was Canopus, a -0.65 magnitude star some 312 light years away, and therefore no direct threat to Jackal.

Alan and I are proud of our decision making. Neither of us wanted to run out of fuel. Neither did we want to stop and float backwards on no wind. More importantly neither of us wanted to be responsible for the wrong decision! Its been clear for days that it would be close and at times re- assuringly good and others obviously bad.

Thanks to our refusal to come down off the fence either way until the last possible moment we got lucky. The night before last when we stopped. We we're headed sw west into the current. When we stopped we floated slightly more north than our original course. This and the early morning attempt to sail resulted in us crabbing east in a semi circle. By a miracle of luck we (I think) found ourselves in the lee of the Island the tide must have been eddying around inshore and pushing us south.

I know just how lucky we we're. This has happened to me before. Last time we got near the islands, had the same view for a week as we stayed effectively still, then floated in a big arc around the north of the whole group for another week. This trip took 9 days. That's a fourteen day improvement on last time.