Day 4 underway on our passage from Vanuatu to Australia. We crossed into Australian waters after breakfast this morning, and now have just over 300 miles to the Great Barrier Reef.

Not gunna sugar-coat, this passage has been a bit of a doozy. Winds have been consistently in the mid to upper 20s, just abaft abeam. Sea swell has also been abeam at 8-10 feet, sometimes breaking. We’ve been set up with white sails double reefed and prevented way out, cooking right along around 8kts, and surfing at times well over 10.  Needless to say, I have been less than enthusiastic to spend much time in the galley, or anywhere inside. Puking, no – seasick, sort of. It’s like being a little bit pregnant, or day two after a nuclear hangover. Nauseous, headache (My name is Ali, and I am a caffeine addict. During wonky seas I start getting the dt’s from coffee withdrawal.) general malaise – the only thing to do is just lay in the aft cockpit with a pillow over your face and float in and out of consciousness.

The boys are superheroes. All of them… They manage to read, watch tv, play video games, and hangout inside without any problems. They are all too happy to live off of Cliff Bars, cereal, yogurt, crackers, and Dinty Moore Stew (I could swear it looked just like dog food as suctioned out of the tin, yerrppp). Ahab is in his element, as he micromanages the trim of the sails every 7-8 minutes. When I come shift, he tends to go into a twenty minute analysis of what he has been adjusting. Yawn. Boring. Where’s Australia? Oh yeah, right, just keep heading west, got it.

We have been keeping our eyes peeled, but have yet to find Nemo or Dori. We have picked up a solid knot from the offshore current, and spotted a trio of sperm whales only 20 meters off our bow. Not much traffic out here, only a solo Chinese cargo ship in the past few days. Looks like just a couple more nights of rough seas, and into the calmer protected waters inside the Reef.