Day 4: Squalls and squalls

Breakfast
- Boiled eggs
- Tortilla rolled with pate

Lunch
- Noodle soup from a package

Dinner
- Cassoulet (fancy beans and wieners) from a can

Pinball is less fun when you are the ball.

Squalls have been batting us back and forth between them all day. The good news is that because the winds are up and the direction is changeable we've actually made a lot more Easting than we did tacking about in light fluky winds. The bad news is that as the squalls went away around nightfall so did the wind. Motoring...

We're getting to that point where we are starting to make covert expectations about landfall timing. We're still far enough away that all estimations of landfall start with "if the wind stays the same" or "if the wind is as forecast".

Carol and I aren't the kind of people who start estimating landfall timing from the first day. In part, this is because for us, setting goals like that can cause us to become overly frustrated with the wind, the seas, or sailing when they don't happen. The other reason is that if we are sailing nicely but slowly and we aren't going to make landfall during daylight we are loathe to start the iron jenny. So occasionally we have changed destinations, skipped the intended landfall and gone on to the next.

Hopeful for landfall in Fakarava tomorrow.