I know you have all been waiting on the edge of your seats to find out the solution to yesterday’s riddle. I’ll get to it in a minute…

There is so much new and different it is hard to pick a single coherent topic for a day’s post. One of the things that might be different than some people expect is that the middle of the ocean is not a desert, empty of life.

We have had birds everyday. Black-footed albatross, and a white bird I think is a kind of petrel. I suspect we are as much a highlight of their day as they are of ours. Especially the albatross spend a lot of time circling the boat, checking out the intruder. Or maybe just hoping for a handout.

Every morning while during my rounds checking equipment, I find a few small 4 to 6 inch long flying fish on deck drying in the sun. We see constant marks on the fishfinder, very deep during the day (>1000 feet) but rising toward the surface at night.

As soon as I finish this we are getting our lines back out and seeing if we can find something worth catching!

Right now our weather routing program is predicting an arrival at Diamond Head off Honolulu on the 17th or 18th, but we have been running a little ahead of its predictions so far.

Oh yes… The answer to the riddle about the GPS saying we went way further than we did: While it WAS wrong about how far the boat moved, it was right about how far IT traveled. The key was I was using a GPS unit mounted at the top of the mast, which moves dramatically from side to side as the boat rolls. It adds all those motions up for a total distance traveled. A quick check of the math confirms that is the most likely answer.