October 18

It is now 4:45am and we are still motoring! New weather forecasts received last night show no increase in wind for the next 5 days, so we are just going to bite the bullet and motor the rest of the way. The sun is rising and the sky is very clear with only a few puffy clouds on the horizon. The sun is rising early because we have not adjusted our local time to match our now longitude yet. We are at the longitude of Tarawa and the local time here is one hour later then in Vanuatu so we need to set our clocks ahead to match. Kiribati is in the same time zone as Fiji, GMT +12.

We have 160 miles to go to reach the entrance to Tarawa and are making 5.5k over ground. We expect to arrive in app. 29 hours, or tomorrow morning at 10am (11am after we switch the clocks ahead). This should put us at anchor at Betio, the name of the capital and town on Tarawa.

The name is pronounced Besho because the Kiribati language having no letter 'S', use the 'ti' combination to mean 'S' and in this case slur it to make the 'sh' sound. According to Lonely Planet this came about because the Hawaiian missionaries who designed the Kiribati written language had no 'S' in their alphabet (the Hawaiian language apparently has no 'S' sound). I guess they were too stingy to add a new letter? Of course, the name of the country itself is not pronounced as it is written, it is pronounced "Kiribas". Apparently this is a corruption of the pronunciation of the English name "Gilberts". Another island in Kiribati (though in the Line Islands group thousands of miles to the East) is Christmas Island and it is spelled "Kirimati" and pronounced "Kirimas" which is of course a corruption of "Christmas". Digression ended.

It is now 12:20pm, local time (UT +12) and we have just a bit over 38miles to go to reach the Equator. We are at latitude 0 degrees 38.6 minutes South and we are motor sailing almost due North on a heading of 358 True at 6.5k. We have about 7k of wind from the East and clear skies and calm seas. We expect to cross the equator at about 6:30pm this evening. Sunset is at 6:17pm this evening where we are and so it should be a lovely sunset when we have our little equator passing celebration. This will be the second time the Queen Jane and crew have crossed the line, the first time being almost exactly 2 ½ years ago on April 16, 2001 on our passage from Mexico to the Marques as islands. Throughout history sailors have placed great meaning on crossing the equator and various rituals and ceremonies have been set down in print recalling these events. Our celebration will be fairly low key, perhaps a cocktail in the cockpit (fruit juice for Jonah) with the captain saying a few brief words.

If it wasn't for the engine droning away day and night it would be a very pleasant passage. On the plus side, we are getting caught up with all the dirty laundry aboard, the sea state being so calm and the sun so hot that hanging wet laundry outside (normally something you would never do at sea) is no problem at all. We have 124 miles to go to reach the entrance to the Tarawa lagoon and still expect to arrive at that point at about 9am tomorrow morning.