Day 11 Update: Spinnaker

Summary: Winds and waves have lightened up and we’re running slightly downwind with the spinnaker and pole up. Waves and occasional gusts have us keeping a very close eye on the setup, but were doing an average of 8.5 kts. No fish caught yesterday.
Position: 09 31.11 S 117 46.80 W at 12:00 UTC-7
COG: 250 degrees m
Distance: 184nm (24 hr), 1,882 nm total
Average Speed : 7.7 kts (24 hr)
Distance to go to Hiva Oa: 1,236 nm
As predicted by the forecast the wind speed is lower and the wave are smaller today. The wind shifted from SE to E this morning after sunrise, so we hoisted the poll and spinnaker. Camille wasn’t thrilled to be woken up early to help with the whole affair. Unfortunately the waves from behind are rolling us side to side as they pass and making it hard for the spinnaker to be fully effective. We tried putting the main wing & wing out on the opposite side, but with the rolling it was flapping back and forth more than helping in any way.
Later, after 1 pm, we had increasing seas and cloudy weather around so we decided to drop the spinnaker before it became too hard to handle. We left the pole out and switched over to about 3/4 of the jib polled out with the main on the opposite (port) side. This stopped the crazy flapping, but we’ve been trying to handle the side to side rolling all day and it is not very pleasant. With the wind shifted from directly from 90 degrees (East) our current heading is 275 degrees downwind, almost directly towards our destination. The only other option is to head off to either side at plus or minus 30-45 degrees which will diminish the rolling, but also put us off the direct route and very likely add more time to a passage we are eager to complete. So we’re not doing that right now…
We have a hazy blue sky today with warmer weather than we’ve had over the past few days. Fortunately this means we are actually getting some decent solar power for a change and maybe we won’t have to run the generator as long tomorrow. The large swells of the past few days kept the autopilot busy and power hungry.
Wildlife Sightings: A couple tiny flying fish on deck, 1 white bird.