Half Way to Easter Island

Curare and crew have crossed the half way mark on their 1950 mile passage from the Galapagos Islands to Easter Island. The first four days of the trip were in light conditions with as many as three sail changes an hour trying to get the optimum sail configuration for the light and variable winds in the doldrums. Once south of 7 degrees latitude we picked up the trade winds blowing off the South American continent. For the past six days theses winds have consistently blown from the southeast at a steady 20 to 25 knots. Our rhumbline course for Easter Island has been 220 degrees, which has us mostly on a close reach. The seas are running high at 2.5 metres with waves and spray on top. As these waves are on our beam we occasionally get slapped sideways by the larger ones. It's been a raucous ride where "one hand for the ship" has true meaning.

We've only seen three ships so far on the passage, and always at night. One ship was heading bow into the seas and came within a half mile of us before we caught their attention and had them fall astern of us. We are limited in our course settings in these conditions so would have had a difficult time to get out of their way.

Four other sailboats are making the passage to Easter Island at this time. All these boats set out a week or more before us, so we are able to collect weather information from them and get a sense of the sea state ahead of us. We talk daily over the radio and track each others positions. One of the vessels, a single handing women, has a disabled rig. Her forestay broke a few days ago and she is sailing along under jury rig, making relatively good progress. Another of the vessels in our group stopped by and gave the disabled boat a jug of water to last the rest of her trip. And if Curare catches up, we will be offering the same.

We've been averaging 100 or so miles per day, so with 900 miles to go we'll be at sea for at least the next week. With Curare so well stocked with provisions, we could continue on for at least another month. But at this point we'd rather get ashore to stretch our legs and see some Moai statues.

We update our position daily so if you'd like to know where we are currently, click on the position report button on the left side of the blog window.