Good Morning Vietnam!!

Ahh another beautiful sunrise watch. Mom came up this morning and told me to get off my lazy bum and write something for the blog... So here I am :) More of the same out here, just getting over some sniffles i picked up from somewhere. How strange! In the 16 years I've been on this boat, not once have I gotten anything but seasick. This trip, I've gotten a cold twice! Normally when we are on the boat, you don't really have contact with enough people for a cold to get carried around, but I suppose it's entirely possible with how many different places we've stopped. Probably doesnt help that it's the middle of winter down here. I can't believe how quickly this trip has gone. Talking to people back home, I hear about all the end of the season championship meets going on, but to me it feels like we just left! Our position now is 17 55 south and 159 34 west, by the time we get to Henderson we will be almost twice as far south as hawaii is north! Our total trip distance since we left Seatt
le is somewhere in the neighborhood of seven THOUSAND miles! Incredible! Heading back to the east, we will have to change the clocks, I think Mangareva is only one hour earlier than Seattle time! When we were over in the Phoenix islands, we were actually five hours different but we elected to stay with Samoa time (four hours from Seattle) for simplicity. Although I hate to say this, for fear of calling over a nasty storm, the ride thus far has been great. We've gone through a few isolated rain showers but even those have been pretty mild. The swells are just to port of the bow, so we are getting very little side to side motion at all. Of course the tradeoff has been a slower speed through the water and about 1.5 knots of current straight on the nose. This morning the current seems to have slacked off though, I saw 9.6 on the gps for the first time since we left Apia! Of course now that I say that it drops to 9.4... oops :P all this beautiful weather and two helicopters on the back dec
k is just killing me, I can't wait to fly around when we get to Mangareva. I think that new motor needs a couple more hours of 'testing' ;) The Cook Islands Weather forcast just came across the radio and man are these guys funny! Back home if the weather is going to be calm they say wind calm or light and variable... Down here, it's "Fine." I want Steve Pool to do his forcasts like that! "Good morning Seattle, fine weather today, light wind in the afternoon. Back to you Joe." For movie night last night, we all watched the new Karate Kid movie, Tomorrow is Rango :) Our big project for the next few days is reorganizing all of our storage space onboard, when things got crazy in shipyard alot of stuff was just piled into the corner, now we finally have the time to get rid of that stuff. My nose is telling me that the omelets are ready so I am going to jump off now... Time to go get fat again :D
I'd love to hear what everyone thinks, feel free to comment or drop me an email! Six days to Mangareva, if anyone has questions I have nothing but time.
Gracias y adios!