Location 40° 58S 82° 58W
Wednesday 11.07.2007

At noon on November 7th, the Schooner Maggie B was at 40° 58S 82° 58W. We are still motorsailing with about ten knots of wind directly behind us. We have 428 NM to go to Canal Chacao and have come 4513 NM from Rangiroa. The sky is partly cloudy but visibility is good. It is nice on deck in the sun, but the cabin is chill with the hatches open to air everything out. We are seeing lots of birds again — albatross and petrels — but we are still skunked on fish.

We are expecting a wind shift to a nice fresh Southerly.

Probably more wind than we need now because our target speed is 6.5 knots to get us to the mouth of the channel at about daybreak on Saturday, a hour or two before tide change.

Looking at charts, one way to grasp our position is that we are exactly on the longitude of Columbus, Ohio. The 4513 NM that we have come from Rangiroa is just about the distance from where we are to Atlanta, Georgia, or by plane from San Francisco to London.

Work on board is now all about landfall.

Checking brightness of riding lights (we haven’t seen a boat, even on radar, since Tahiti), cleaning, printing out crew lists, cleaning, reorganizing stores, cleaning, preparing Spanish standard phrases, cleaning, studying charts. We are trying not to go crazy this last step.

All is well.

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