Just a quick little update for the family...

..to let you know we're ok. We're about 125 miles outside of Funafuti, Tuvalu. The lost fishing lure count is now at 5. These fish are huge. We have 200 - 600 lb test on and they're either snapping it in half or taking the whole thing. I have a 600 lb test line out now and if they take this one, we're going to quit fishing because I'm not sure what we would do with a fish that size anyway (assuming we could get it on board...Andy almost had his fingers sliced open by trying to pull in one of the lines yesterday without gloves on).

We tried to pull the spinnaker out again today for the third day in a row, since she was behaving so nicely. Then, oops, premature deployment. Andy was pulling the halyard to get the sock up getting ready to deploy the sail, when the sock just took off. If you're not familiar with it, the sock is like a long, well, sock, that keeps the sail tucked up all nice and neat until you're ready to pull on it's lines and SLOWLY lift the sock up, letting the sail take off. Today, no one was pulling and it certainly was slow. The bad part about this is that the lines you use to pull up are the same lines you use to pull it back down and guess where they were? Flying about at the top of the mast. While the spinnaker was out and we were doing a nice 7 knots, we had no way to take it back down. Andy climbed the mast and with much effort and ingenuity, he managed to get the lines down. As soon as we had it all worked out, the wind shifted forward to 75 degrees and we had to bring it down and put up the jib. Oh well, we'll be in Tuvalu tomorrow morning so we can leave her in the bag while my heart gets back to a normal pace.

Not much else going on. It's been such a nice passage that we've considered skipping Tuvalu and continuing on, but that's not really the point of cruising now is it (or is it?)?

The email is rather unreliable out here and often takes up to an hour to send, so updates may be a little scattered, don't worry about us...the weather is beautiful. I'm not sure if Tuvalu has any sort of internet, but I'm guessing no since the latest news is they're out of water (no water, chances are, there's no internet)...so no pictures for a while. I'll update as soon as I can.

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