Half Way There!

Well here we are at day 14 of our crossing and all is well. We are at S08 40 and W121 12 and are on a heading of 256 degrees which in theory in 1039 miles will have us arrive at Fatu Hiva on Tuesday of next week unless the winds get too light and it will take us another day.
Now that we have accepted the actualities of this passage we have got into a rhythm of managing the watches and sleeping whenever we can. The time goes by easier than I had anticipated—enjoying reading lots of books, doing sudokus and we have a daily scrabble game. Those combined with our efforts to diagnose the best point of sail to cope with the light and easterly winds—involves raising, lowering and letting out and pulling in the sails. Then putting up and bringing down the spinnaker all which takes time and effort—we are still looking for the passage where you do not change the sails for days but perhaps would be bored.
We had a great couple of days when the winds turned a little and came from the SE which boosted our westward progress a lot but they have returned eastward and lightened up, we are hoping they will strengthen again. We have had squalls at night where they were up to 31K. Our friends on Cutty Wren who are 450 miles ahead got winds of 40K in a squall the other night which we are hoping will have moved on before we get there. We have never had anything more than 30-35 which we decided was enough---20-22K for our boat is the optimum. We are talking to boats both ahead and behind us on the radio daily and learn from those ahead and give advise to those behind.
We bought a lot of extra jerry cans with fuel--$1 05 a gallon in the Galapagos as opposed to $7 in the Marquesas—but as we have had good winds we have not needed to motor and so are a very heavy catamaran. The cardinal rule of catamarans is not to overload it but we already had broken that rule when we left Canada and have now compounded it. Another catamaran ahead of us had done the same and then found they were bow heavy and too slow so they just motor sailed like crazy for a week till they burned up the extra fuel. They were then lighter and sailed the rest of the way and got to the Marquesas in 14 days. We will take the extra time, be heavy and hopefully will get to Tonga or beyond with our fuel.
We see flying fish on a regular basis, they are very cool. They are in schools and will fly through the air for hundreds of feet, often landing on our deck. Ken cooked some but they are too small and bony so will await the squid which we prefer. He caught a 3 foot dorado ((mahi mahi) yesterday so that was a nice treat for supper. Our freezer had emptied somewhat so had room to freeze the rest. We are down to potatoes, onions, garlic lemons and a pathetic looking cabbage and are starting on the canned stuff. Yes the Bimbo bread is still surviving, although we are at the last loaf so will not be able to do the 4 week test and the eggs are still OK.
All in all it is not painful and besides the alternative could be that we had to go to work and cope with snow.
Hopefully when I update this next week we will be looking at palm trees and sandy beaches.