This morning at 9:15am local time we hoisted the anchor and motored out of Anaho Bay on the North coast of Nuku Hiva. We are bound for Raroia in the Tuomotus approximately 450nm the South. The sky is mostly clear with about 20% cloud cover and it is very hot, as usual. The wind is only about 8k from the NE, but we are hoping it will move to the East once we get South of the island into open water.

At 12:30pm local time we rounded the SW corner of Nuku Hiva and finally got some wind. We have been motoring up till now in light air in the lee of the island. We have about 11-14k from the ESE and are making between 6.5k and 7k over the ground on a heading of 187M.

At 8pm local time we are now 400nm away for our waypoint at the entrance to the lagoon at Raroia. We are making decent progress in a light wind of 10k from the SE. Our speed is about 6.5k over ground and the seas are very very calm with a slight swell from the SE of about 1ft. We've been in anchorages less comfortable then this in the last few weeks! The nav computer puts us 2days and 12hours at our current pace. The only down side is that there is a 'new' moon (i.e. not visible) and this makes nights extremely dark. Its not really a problem however, just less fun sailing at night.

Our local time right now is set to Marquesan time which is UT -9:30, an oddball zone which is on the half hour instead of on the hour like most zones. The rest of French Polynesia is on UT -9 and we intend to switch to this zone during the night. This will make our lives much simpler for many reasons, not least among them being that Microsoft has failed to provide support for half hour time zones in Windows (i.e. Windows does not include the ability to set the local time zone to -9:30, it has options only for -9 or -10). Additionally, the software we use for weather tracking and tide prediction also has trouble with half hour times zones.