Day 2, Passage to Easter Island

1245Z 29AUG19, Day 2, Ecuador to Easter Island. We continue to make progress in a mixed bag of winds. The course has been better and then worse as well. Basically all is as expected. The weather forecasts have all shown that these first few days would be lighter winds so we are taking what we get and adjusting accordingly. We expect we may have to motor some today.

Current Position: 03 09S 084 47W
24 hour progress: 131nm, 5.5kts avg SOG, approximately 2020nm to go on the great circle route. Yesterday the weather was beautiful and sunny for a short while in the morning and then it went back to being gray. We continue to sail close hauled and about 30-40 degrees north of the desired rhumb line course. Winds are between 10-20kts.

The crew is well and there is a lot of extra sleeping. There are still some tender stomachs but the extra sleep is helping as are the periods of light winds and calm seas. The boys have been motivated to stand watches on their own and have done some writing. There also has been some books on tape, music listening and show watching as we work into the passage making groove.

The refrigerator is acting up, yet again. It's drained a lot of battery power and it has not been pumping the cooling sea water through it. The frozen meat is acting like a big ice block so things are still plenty cold (we have a thermometer inside and the meat is still frozen). Jon will take apart the pump, again, today to see if he can get it clean and pumping again. Overall the refrigerator has been acting better - after we installed two additional filters. It had been working great in the marina. As we prepped to get underway we cleaned out the filters after the hull was cleaned. Cleaning the hull usually knocks extra crap into the filters and also there was a lot of sludge that collects in the filters sitting in that marina. So we are pretty sure it hasn't worked properly for the last few days. Hopefully we can get it back to working well today. We definitely have a love / hate relationship with that thing! As these things go, just when all seemed to have been working well and you have a load of food that needs to stay fresh, that's when you need to clean it and it decides to act up.