[password] STUART32
[position] 31 29.000s 173 33.000w

[date] 2018-07-01
[status] There has never been a truer word spoken than "if its going to happen it will happen out there"; which is a line from the film "Captain Ron". We discovered that there may be a structural flaw emerging inside our Whitlock electric auto-pilot drive unit; as there is a cracking sound coming from inside the unit, and we still have 1500nms to go to get to FP. That said it is still working for now at least. Whilst we do have a spare unit, our preference is not to replace it at sea whilst our current one is still working, rather we'll baby it by keeping weather helm to a minimum; and only resorting to replacing it if it really does fail before we get to FP. Our second drama is that our main sail has jammed coming out around the 3rd reefing point. We don't see a real need to go up the mast at sea to unjam it though as we expect to be running most of the way to FP; so the main in somewhat redundant anyway. So for now we're just leaving the small amount of a main out so we at least have some main sail working. If need be we know we can bring the main all the way back in without issue. Apart from being kept busy with these two issues, all is well aboard. We managed to sail around 6 hrs over the last 24hrs, and only recently turned the motor back off now that the centre of the high has passed us and we are starting to see a 5-10 knot NW breeze emerge; but this maybe premature as the wind is still fluky and may take a few more hours to truly settle back in. Oh the other item worth noting is at that we are changing our intended port of entry from Bora Bora to the next island on its eastern side; namely Raiatae, as this will allow us to catch up with friends we've not seen since the Galapagos Islands early in 2013.
[weather] 5-10knots NW, 60% cloud cover, 1-3m swell. 1028 Baro
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