Niue's Near

We are about 140 miles away from Nuie tonight. It is cold on watch -- 72*F, or an even colder 22*C. Overcast and the moon hasn't come up yet. As one boat described it on the HF radio, its like being in the English Channel. Except we haven't seen a ship or another cruising boat in almost a 1,000 miles. We've been making really good days sailing, typically 180 miles days. We should make it into Nuie before dark tomorrow. It will be tomorrow our time, but day after tomorrow Nuie time. Nuie is past the dateline which means at some point soon we loose a day. Hope it s not my birthday we loose.

Paul



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Enroute Niue

Sunrise has us currently about 50 miles north of Palmerston Island. The sailing has been pretty good and we are going to keep going to Nuie and skip Palmerston. Nuie is about another 420 miles or so. It looks like today will be the first day that we get some blue sky. Its been a fast sail -- we are about 600 miles from where we started. The winds have been well behaved most of the time. They get a little rambuncous for a few hours in the middle of the night. We are mostly cruising along at 7 to 8 kts with some 9's thrown in with the wave pushes. We expect to make Nuie on Monday evening. That would be Monday evening on our time, but we will loose a day heading into Nuie -- some kind of calendar black-hole thing. So we will actually most likely arrive Tuesday evening. Friends there tell us the humpback whales are hanging near the anchorage, so it should give us another opportunity to take lots of pictures of the water with the title 'this is where the whale was'.
Paul


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The SPCZ

The South Pacific Convergence Zone, aka S-P-C-zed, is hanging low over us. It brings 90-100% overcast skies and light drizzle. This just didn't seem like the best conditions for visiting Suwarrow and there are no real hints that the convergence zone was going to move off somewhere else. It apparently likes to hang further N and E in El Nino conditions, moving it closer to the equator and where we are. So after sailing for two days in a line mostly pointing toward Suwarrow we changed course this afternoon to head to the island nation of Niue. Its about 750 miles away. We'll pass close by Palmerston Atoll, a part of the Cooks. We may decide to stop in there for a few days. This island is populated by three families, all descended from one Englishman (or maybe Scots) and his three Polynesian wives.
The winds are 15-20kts and the seas are small, making for some comfortable sailing.

Paul



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