Day 3

This morning the forseeable, unavoidable happened: at 9am we had to start the motor. All our efforts to keep sailing without hurting the Alita and her equipment too much (spinnaker, poled out genoa) failed in the end. So we took all sails down and started the engine. Yesterday was lalready light wind day, we put the spinnaker up for a while. At night the wind picked up again and this morning it died. We're still rolling, of course. Waves up to 2m are still rolling in from behind and smaller waves going different directions. But it's nothing bad. Just disturbing the cooking ;-) Now it seems strange that 1,5 day ago we had wind gusting up to 50 (!) knots). Through all the strong wind the waves had stayed amazingly small with up to 4m - and no one got seasick (I cheated, however. I took a light pill the first 2 days before I felt anything. Otherwise cooking would have been quite difficult). Today with the dying wind the summer started. All of a sudden we all exchanged long pants (at nights I even wore 2 layers) and warm shirts + Jacktes to T-Shirts and Shorts and there is no expression how my first shower on this trip felt today - open air on deck. SOOO refreshing. To celebrate haveing survived the rougher weather I made "Kaiserschamrrn" for lunch. Yummy. So on we motor. In 2 days we should arrive in Minerva Reef north. So far we travelled 500nm through the water (with all the detours we did trying to catch enough sailing wind), we have 270nm left to go.
Our position at lunch time can be found as always on the page "Where is Alita".
27deg23,8S and 177deg 53,8E

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