A nice night out here. The motor is back on, and we are pushing against the current, which is not a thing you choose so much as a thing you accept this far south. We are having fun anyway, in the way you do when the boat is moving in the right direction and the breeze, when there is breeze, is mostly behaving. There are plenty of small chores to fill the hours, the way every day on a passage seems to fill itself.

We have also picked up some hitchhikers. A small troupe of swallow-tailed gulls, with red-ringed eyes that suggest they have been up too late and are not quite ready to admit it. They have decided the rails and the bimini are theirs now, and any objections would have to be filed in writing.

Sometime in the late afternoon a brown booby joined the rotation, taking up a perch on the starboard winch like he had paid extra for the seat. Nobody on board has the heart to relocate him, and the sun on the wood and the line, with that quiet color the Pacific gets just before the day gives up, is its own argument for letting things be.

Almost there. Not quite. But the company is excellent, and we are making the kind of progress that gets reported in inches when the current is set against you. Tomorrow there should be land on the chart, and a quieter sea state to clean up a few things before we make landfall.