A scorcher of a day with winds frustratingly low, but just enough to move us along with Pinkz up. The great bonus has been the South Equatorial current, which thankfully is flowing in our direction and at just under 2 knots, so it has helped us enormously. It really is all the Pacific water hitting PNG and being forced west. What a help it has been to our speed. Crazily at times we were going faster than the wind speed! We are so close to the equator now although we will not cross it. We are now going west all the way to Indonesia. The water temp is regularly going over 32 degrees.
The day chugged by. The same fishing trawler passed in front of us this morning, Rowan called them on the vhf, we were surprised to get a prompt reply with fairly good english. Rowan was worried he might have nets out, luckily he said they had no nets out, they were just looking for fish. We have had a terrible message a while ago on a sailing Indonesia WhatsApp group of a boat that got caught up in a trawler’s nets in the evening. The trawler started hauling in the nets and they were being dragged along and in danger of breaking their rudder or whatever the nets were stuck on. The tension was so much they could not boat hook the nets to cut it free, it took until the morning to get the trawlers attention when they were finally cut free. Sounded horrendous as the sailboat was taking in water, not an ordeal we want to experience. From here on we will see a lot more fishing trawlers, the recommendation is not to do overnight passages.
It was an easy night for me to be on shift, we had a couple of squalls during the afternoon which meant taking down Pinkz but once the evening arrived the squalls disappeared. It was a beautiful clear night sky with amazing stars and just a small new moon.
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