As captain I take when to have the halfway party as a very serious issue as there is always the post halfway depression. Different people feel it to different degrees. However, in my experience if you delay the halfway party to a day past when you actually think you are halfway then the second half seems to be going quicker. At the end of the day who really knows what halfway is especially when you are not straight lining it i.e. paccup or atlantic. If you are delivering back from Hawaii or in this case down the coast and you have to sail most of a circle to get to your destination halfway is a hard one to figure out. Is it halfway on lat and long, halfway on mileage or halfway on time? All of those can be substantially different. I tend to always use the time theory and then use the worst case scenario i.e. worst case the trip could be 20 days so have the halfway at 10/11 days it the mileage seems to coincide then great.

Anyways I am rambling. Only because my watch partner at this point has ants in his pants and wants to get it done and has commented three times in the last two watches that they distance to go is not going down. Another problem with using the distance to go is that that number changes dramatically as routing changes. Routing will change a lot when trying to work your way around a high pressure system and a large north going current. So here we sit 1151nm possibly to go at our average speed which has been 8.1knots this trip that puts us in late Saturday night.

Puerto Montt is reached by going through the Chile Basin over the Chile Rise to Golfo Coronados and then in through a channel between Isle de Chileo and mainland Chile. In this channel called Canal Chacao the tide can reach 8-9 knots so there is no going through unless on a favourable. Slack tide only lasts a few minutes! The tidal range is 8m in springs or 25 feet. So we could end up if luck is with us hitting the entrance at the right time. If luck is against us we have to anchor outside at Caleta Godoy and await the change in current. The Canal takes us into Golfo de Ancud then leaving Isle Puluqui to port through Paso Quellin into Seno Reloncavi. We will be at Marina Oxxean with the isla Tenglo across the channel from us and about 2 miles from the city. The pictures of the marina in the pilot book look great. The write up about Perto Montt itself from the lonely planet guide does not excite!

But that is 7 days down the road.. The wind has gone right on the nose and looks to be the case for the next 5 days. The sun continues to rise and give OK displays but what is cool is having the light of the moon from the stern at the same time as the sun appears on the horizon off the port bow. We have 5 days worth of fuel but are hoping not to use it as this motor sailing is not as fun as sailing. In the meantime it is very lonely out here. We last saw a ship 15^th and it is the 20^th prior to that we saw one on the 11^th. They were probably wondering like us what a boat was doing out here. Haven’t seen any wildlife for about the same amount of time it was over a week ago that we had an albatross around otherwise there has been no wildlife. The other news is I will have run out of cornflakes by Tuesday which is a little bit of disaster as I have run out of fresh fruit for my morning yoghurt, cornflakes and fruit. Guess I should have added a few more bags of cornflakes to my supermarket cart. And so life continues on the 6-8am, 12-4pm and 8pm-midnight watch.