Day 6, Passage to Easter Island

1245Z 02SEP19, Day 6, Ecuador to Easter Island. We continue to make direct progress and good speed under favorable conditions.

Current Position: 08 41S 091 08W
24 hour progress: 140nm, 5.8kts avg SOG. Overall progress for the passage is 773nm with approximately 1520nm to go on the great circle route. Winds continue to vary but have mostly been 10-15kts - sometimes a little lower and sometimes a little higher. We are able to hold a good course and are sailing a pretty comfortable beam reach. The seas are still fairly calm but the wave direction has changed due to the shift in wind.

Today is Daxton's birthday! Our amazing, determined, charismatic, always curious, extrovert turns 10. Both boys have had their birthday's at sea this year. They like it because they get a pre and post celebration on land and we still try to do something on their birthday which breaks up the monotony of the days at sea. We plan to try to make some treats, if conditions permit, and surprise Daxton with Avengers End Game (thanks Joseph!) and a few other small gifts from us. Thank you for all the birthday notes and gift cards!

The crew continues to be doing fine. Ronan and Megan both seem to have gotten a little bug. Hopefully it will pass soon and be limited to them. We put the fishing line in again yesterday and caught a decent sized Mahi around lunch time. Daxton requested ceviche for his birthday lunch so we figured we'd better start trying the day before. We had a sushi lunch and will have ceviche for lunch today and some rib-eye steaks for dinner. There won't be any fishing today and it might be time to try a different lure to see if we can catch something else to have a break from Mahi.

Following up to yesterday's post, a little more about our fishing gear. There's a great shop on the marina waterfront in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria that got us "hooked" up right. We suspect they set up at least half the sailboats in the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) every year. They provided us with a skein of line to put on our hand reels, and taught us how to rig blue water fishing gear to the scale we needed. Each line ends in a large ball bearing swivel that has a clasp for attaching the leader and lure rigs. We use the same monofilament to build our leaders as on our reels. The leaders have the lures built on to the ends and everything is put together with crimps instead of knots. We mostly fish rubber squid skirts in pink or silver. The skirts are pulled over lead bulb weights, a few beads on the leader then serve as a spacer ahead of the large single hooks that are crimped on the end of the leader. We also have a traditional cedar plug we fish on a similarly rigged leader. It all works, and we seem to average a fish about every other day that we fish on most passages since leaving the Mediterranean.