Day 2, Atlantic Crossing

1230Z 19DEC18, Day 2, Atlantic Crossing. We have continued to sail with winds largely 15-20 kts. In the early morning hours we started seeing some gusts up to 25 and more recently closer to 30 kts. Things remain rather comfortable and we have been making good speed and progress south. After daylight, just after 9am, we decided to gybe which makes our course westerly. We may need to gybe south again at some point to stay in the trade winds, but we should be able to make some progress west for awhile. We are continuing to sail a broad reach. We reefed the main around 0940 when gusts built above 25 kts. We've made a general course of 200T and then 260T after the gybe.

Current Position: 23 46.6N 019 26.0W
24 hour progress: 154nm, 6.4kts avg SOG, 304nm total progress, approximately 2370nm to go along the great circle route from our current position to the Caribbean (we may still push further south of the great circle to stay in better wind). Current weather is warm and sunny, each day has gotten a little warmer.

The conditions continue to be pretty easy and we are excited to have maintained such good average speeds - 2 days in a row of 100% sailing and 150+nm days is a new Zephyros record. Jon and I both slept pretty deeply last night so today will hopefully include catching a bit of extra sleep as we settle into the watch schedule.

Yesterday, after sending out our update we had an exciting couple of hours. We saw a wooden pallet floating in front of us. As we came past it, we saw that there was a sea turtle swimming next to it. I was hoping the turtle wouldn't grab our fishing lure when I saw that our line had already caught a fish! We all also saw more fish under the pallet (confirming why we don't put 2 lines in - maybe if we get low on food we will consider it though). We all got excited and set to work. The fish was clearly colorful which meant we had caught a Mahi Mahi!!! Also at the same time as all this was going on we were at our closest point of approach with our sailboat companion that had showed up yesterday morning plus a new cargo ship, that we had also been tracking and watching. This ship was getting ready to pass us on a reciprocal course, fairly closely. Everyone did a great job with Ronan standing watch and lookout while Jon filleted the fish. I cleaned up the morning dishes and got the sushi rice going and Daxton helped bring the fish inside and helped with the kitchen clean up.

By 1530 everything had settled down, we all had eaten a good sized portion of Mahi poke and we haven't seen another vessel close to us since. In fact, we lost sight and contact with the other sailboat later in the afternoon and haven't seen any other contacts at all. Basically all the major excitement of the day occurred in a 15-30 minute period.

The Mahi Mahi was a good size and we had a delicious lunch and dinner out of it. The cats are still not interested though and continue to demand their dry food. Other excitement of the day was that the boys finished up creating our passage bingo chart and we already have 5 squares marked off (underway - which is the free space, sea turtle, 150nm sail day, catch a fish and trade wind turn). We are hoping to get a blackout bingo by the end of the passage.