July 12

July 12, 1900 hrs. (Hawaii time) position N 40.17 / W 152.52
Hello civilization! :) Today has been a decent day, not wonderful sailing, but ok. We motored for a couple of hours and finally decided that there might just be enough wind to fly wing and wing. We gave it a go, sailed a couple hours that way but there wasn't enough wind for the wind vane to steer the boat. So, we fired the motor up again for a bit. Then out went the sails again. We are currently flying the main and jib wing and wing. The wind is light, maybe about 10 knots, but with a little bit of a current push we are doing 5 knots. We are sailing home, just not quickly. Bob fixed a small oil leak on the small generator today so we had our daily dose of repair. The weather has been beautiful today, which made the slow sailing far more tolerable, especially with calm seas. I did a mental calendar check and believe that I am supposed to be on duty today so that made the nice relaxed pace and nice weather even that much better! :) We are hoping that we can keep moving along even at this pace, the weather report looks like we might not have much wind the next couple of days. During our nightly check in with the Pacific Seafarer's Net we got a nice surprise. Bob Johnson, who I work with at Astoria Fire, hailed us from home on his HAM radio and sent us a "hi from Astoria". It was pretty cool to hear a familiar voice after 11 days out here. Thanks for that Bob!
Not much else to report. We are heading north again (still) trying to get enough latitude to try to get over the North Pacific High. Right now we are about equal with Eureka California on the mainland. Still a long way to go but considering where we started it looks like pretty good progress.