Location: Underway to the Marquesas
Today was the first day of Nav Master Exams. The Nav master course is one of the harder segments of our seamanship classes aboard. We had 9 shipmates take the course today, and two of them were my Professional Skipper course students, Gavi and Martin. I hear they did well! For lunch, we had some lentil curry made by Nacho, and after the Nav Master exam, round 1 started. The shipmates taking the exam spread out in the saloon and Chart House in whatever space they could find to lay their charts. The exam lasted an hour and a half. After watch team 1 did some line splicing while on the afternoon watch, for a new fore staysl preventor. We have been sailing very deep with the wind off our port quarter for the past 8 days now, averaging about 8 knots. Im expecting the wind to die out tonight into tomorrow morning, unfortunately, leaving us with less wind than needed to sail, at which point we will turn on the engine and motor the final week to Nuku Hiva. Im expecting to arrive there on the 5th of April, maybe earlier. With this reduction in wind, we will also be seeing the wave height subside a little bit; currently, they are around 7ft with the occasional 9-footer. I am very happy we were able to sail for this long on this passage, and our students are too! For dinner, we had pumpkin soup and naan, which was delicious!
After, Avery and I went into the engine room to turn on the generator and watermaker. We have a pretty sweet watermaker onboard, it makes about 15lpm of drinkable fresh water from seawater. It works by pushing seawater into two tubes that contain semi-permeable membranes, which will only let water through, but not salt. The seawater is pressed into these membranes at 800psi, and on the other side, fresh drinkable water comes out. The salt is then discharged overboard in a highly concentrated seawater mixture called Brine. After we turned on the water maker, I checked the weather for the next few days (still no wind). And with that, I call it a day.