Galapagos to the Marquesas, the first week.

After seven days and nights at sea time begins to pass in a blur, and without our careful log keeping we wouldn't know which day it was. As we are heading mainly westwards we are noticing later dawns and sunsets and tomorrow our clocks go back an hour when we reach 105 degrees west, and every 15 degrees (600 miles) after that. The first week of nights has been pretty dark, though very starry skies when there are no clouds. Now though we have a lovely little moon at least for the first few hours of darkness.
With just the two of us on board we do 3 hour watches during the night. We've seen very little shipping, but it's important to be vigilant. Only this morning we were commenting that we hadn't seen any ships for 4 days, then looked out and saw a huge container ship only a mile away - passing astern of us, but we were concerned that we hadn't noticed it coming. We keep a better lookout at night than during the day when we are often busy down below. A lesson learned. To a big ship we are a tiny blip on their radar which very likely will go unnoticed.
Now that we are in the trade winds we have very comfortable and consistent sailing. 10 - 15 knots of wind on the beam and quite calm seas. Very little adjustment of sails is required. We cover about 6 -7 nautical miles in an hour, and at this speed our prop generator keeps the batteries completely charged so no worries about running the frig, the watermaker, navigation lights in the dark, and the autohelm.
The nearest land is about 800 miles away, but unlike intrepid sailors in the past, we don't feel alone on the ocean. Every morning we check in with a short wave radio 'net' along with about 20 other boats doing the same passage. As there are also French, German and Italian language nets, and quite a lot of people who don't check in at all or don't have an SSB radio, there are plenty of sailing boats on this huge bit of ocean. Our nearest sailing boat (to our knowledge) is about 60 miles away. In the evening we get in touch with a group of boats that left the Galapagos within a few days of each other, and keep tally of everyone's position and weather. This is a nice informal session, and as we are all within 1000 miles of each other we can usually hear each other pretty well. We get warning of any bad weather ahead, info today that 2 fishing boats stayed half a mile behind one of the boats for quite a long time last night (always a bit worrying, and fishing boats are notoriously bad at responding to radio calls) Also a query from someone who had seen 2 very bright searchlights just above the horizon. Evidently helicopters with spotlights are sometimes used to attract fish for fishing boats. And we get an hour of BBC world service news to keep us up to date.
A typical day involves minor (hopefully) maintenance and checking of systems, making bread or cake or yoghurt, fishing, a bit of laundry, Geoff keeps up spreadsheets of our progress (and he checks to see if we are advancing on the nearest boats!), emailing, napping (we only get 6 hrs in bed at night, so need to do a bit of catching up during the day), and preparing meals. Everything takes longer than it would on land, particularly food preparation, as nothing can be put on table or work surface without being secured or it will spill or land up on the floor. We use non-slip mats, the gymballed cooker, the sink, and even wedge things with 5 litre water bottles on the floor. Washing up has to be dried and put away immediately.
We were well stocked up with fresh food when we left, and at the moment are still enjoying fresh salads and fruit. However this time next week we will have to start using tins. With fresh fish of course. At the moment we have mahi mahi in the frig. At dawn we usually find flying fish and squid stranded on deck, no good for eating, rather slimy, but very good used as bait on the fishing line.
So far sightings of wild life have been rather limited, no dolphins at all. One whale glimpsed blowing and surfacing at a distance, and lots of flying fish. A few petrels flying low over the waves, but haven't yet seen an albatross. Well, with more than 2000 miles to go there is plenty of time yet.