After the sun came up, the wind became flakey and at around 7 am I had to start the engine and motor sail. The ocean remained choppy all day and I spent most of the day doing boat jobs.
I fixed a squeak that had been annoying me all night and I installed my large portable fan in my cabin. Hopefully now I will be able to sleep well on these hot barmy nights.
I had to teach myself how to use Open CPN again, as I haven't used it for so long, then once I got it going, I managed to get all my old Google maps working for the King George and Berkeley River's.
Throughout the day there were lots of schools of tuna jumping with sea birds diving overhead. At one point a pod of dolphins joined us to ride our bow wave for a while before getting bored and swimming off.
The wind came up in the afternoon and we were able to sail once again and shut the engine off. We tested the satellite phone and were in constant contact with friends and family all afternoon, sending messages back and forth and I finished entering all the way points into my GPS for the Berkeley River bar crossing.
The sun set at 18:51 and we sailed on into the dark for the second night. At one point I was out on deck in the dark and a flying fish touched my leg scaring the shit out of me.
The wind got up to around 20 knots about 2am and I had to reef the sails in the dark. I was having difficulty keeping the boat facing upwind on my own as the wind kept filling the main sail and spinning us around. I revved the engines quite hard to force the noise back around and the starboard engine water pump belt started to slip and shortly after the engine over heated and I had to shut it down.
After reefing and trimming the sails and getting us back on course, I then spent a hot hour in the engine room adjusting the water pump belt tension. We passed two small boats in the night without AIS, and I assumed they were probably yachts on their way from the Kimberly to Darwin.
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