#40 NOW April 19, 2005 0125 PDT N13’07.4 W112’40.2 Temp 80.4, Water Temp 87.9 Wind 030 @ 14 kts. Seas are 4-7 feet, Para-vanes extended, Heading 204’ magnetic Miles Completed 626, Miles to Go 2149, SOG (speed over ground) 4.4 kts. Good Morning, As you can see from the above, it is a very early morning. I have the watch from 0100 to around 0600. We have found that longer watches are easier, giving each one of us a good five hours of sleep. Since I can go to sleep early usually around 2000, I find the 0100 to 0600 a good watch for me. We also take naps during the day as needed. It really works well! We have extended the para-vanes (stabilizers) and at the same time, we ended up running into a little counter-current. This is not good and hopefully will change soon. We should be making at least 4.8 knots with the para-vanes down. We extended them last night around 1800 to make super and sleeping a little easier. The seas have picked up some, but we will retract the para-vanes in the morning if the current does not change. The boat and its systems have been working pretty well since “Black Friday” when we had so many problems. The watermaker is the biggest concern as it has started leaking air into the system again. That system is a real challenge to keep running properly. Yesterday morning, just before I went off watch, a dozen or so porpoises came by and followed along for a couple of hours. They were a great diversion with all their acrobatics. One had mastered the back flip, and would come down with a tremendous slap as he hit the water. In addition, there have been some red-footed booby birds accompanying us. Each night they take up residence on our para-vane poles that we leave extended all the time. Wendy asked what time we use onboard. For all our weather and radio reports, we use UTC or Greenwich. However, for everything else we use zonetime. This is quit easy to find, by taking your longitude and dividing it by 15. Subtract this number from UTC time and you have zonetime. Another way to say it: for every 15 degrees of longitude from the zero meridian is one hour. We are presently in the 105-120 degree zone, which gives us -7 hours from UTC. Now if all that has confused you, we are using the same time right now as most of you PDT. This will change once we pass 120 degrees of Longitude. We finally ran out of range for the XM radio. This is truly a real loss as we enjoyed not only all the commercial free music, but also CNN, PBS, Bloomberg, and other enjoyable talk stations. Therefore, our only news source from outside “our world,” is your e-mails. It is always nice to see several when we do a download on our satellite phone. Have a Great Day!!! We are! Life is a Cruise, Larry and Jim Larry Rick Done Dreamin' Nordhavn 40 #33 Site: http://gricknet.homedns.org/ Email: <mailto:donedream@pacbell.net>donedream@pacbell.net