Last night the watch is more than ideal. The sea is flat. There is a gentle cool tropical breeze caressing your skin. The rhythm of undulating sea swells gently rock Bella Donna. This is our last night before landfall. The moon not yet full but so brilliantly bright that it looks like daylight with very dark sun glasses on, you can see the whole sky from horizon to horizon, every cloud is visible and every wave in the ocean can be seen. For a while we all sit in the fly bridge and talk before John and Deborah try to grab some sleep before their watch. If we were not on passage this would have been the perfect romantic moonlit night following pupus and sundowners that the girls would enjoy.
An hour after dark I am facing the stern trying to capture a high definition movie in my mind of this experience. Suddenly a white hot burning light falls from the sky into the water some immeasurable distance behind Bella Donna. My mind tries to make sense of what I just saw. At first I think I see a shooting star. Then I try to make sense of it as a distress flare launched from a stranded boat or even a drifting life raft. A flare would not have been falling so fast, a life saving flare has a little parachute on it to slow its fall. My mind returned to a shooting star and I thought of space junk that has fallen out of orbit and returned to earth. That is ok as long as it falls at an unused spot in the ocean. The whole experience is sort of star trek.
Friday morning is just the ideal continuation of the night before. The sea is flat; the 7 knot true wind is on our stern so with our speed of 7 knots over ground the apparent wind, what our sails and ourselves feel, starts out at zero making sailing impossible and even the cool morning rather warm. The progress is slow, but we are anxious to make landfall.
The wind has picked up, but a current is helping to push us along at almost 9 knots. We will be in Kailua Kona about 9 tonight. We can see the Big Island now. At first it appears to be a huge cloud. Even now we are less than 10 miles from its shore, but it is hard to see through the clouds and vog.
God Bless Bella Donna
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