We had a decent passage from Bora Bora to Suwarrow with seas at a rocky 6 feet when we left, working and slowly mellowing out a little each day to nice 3 foot seas by the last day. Up until that last day we were running at 1600-1700 rpm and doing about 6.4 knots. The last day the wind and current both picked up in our favor and we had to slow down to 1400 rpm to keep our speed at 6.4 knots. Why slow down? So we could arrive at daylight in Suwarrow.

We are doing 4 hour watches. The days drag on slowly and blur together. We read, play video games, watch movies, and spent a lot of time staring at the horizon. We both sleep a lot when not on watch. The sunrises and sunsets have not been spectacular, but nice to watch none-the-less. The moon has been full to mostly full and incredibly bright. We could clearly see unlit islands in the distance in the moonlight; though it is hard to see the stars in the bright light. Every other day we check email and blog comments. That is the highlight of the day. The banana-coconut pastries were pretty good. We had a few flying fish stow away.

Here are the sunsets from the last two days


And here are a few more answers to blog questions:

Q: Do you still have your first boat, Seas the Day?
A: No, we sold it prior to getting Kosmos.

Q: Will you stay at a hotel?
A: Doubtful in the South Pacific, but probable in a few other parts of the world where we can tie up to land.

Q: Do any of the South Pacific islands you have visited have boat rentals?
A: We haven’t noticed any, but we weren’t looking. We would bet Tahiti does.

To clarify, poverty level in Tahiti is $4600 USD or less per month, not per year.

Q: Please comment on the livability of the boat, good or bad, and steering.
A: See FAQ’s for steering and a list of reasons why we recommend buying a Nordhavn 43. The specific answer to this “livability” is highly personal. It depends on what you can live with, or more importantly, live without. We have seen whole families living happily on smaller boats with less luxuries, and we have had lots of people tell us they could never live on Kosmos, either because of the small size or lack of a particular luxury they need to be happy.
We love living aboard Kosmos. We think it has plenty of space, but we also lived in a small house prior. Actually, we wouldn’t choose a larger boat at this point in time because that would mean more maintenance and more difficulty getting in and out of tight places, like Manihi. We put a lot of care into choosing options that work for our lifestyle, which has a lot to do with why we are so happy living aboard. Without certain options, we may have not liked it.
That said, here are our minor complaints: Our oven doesn’t work well. We have to add 50 degrees and double the cook time. A better oven is offered as an upgrade, but it means sacrificing much needed drawer space and we decided the drawer space was more important. We wish we had a two drawer freezer instead of top loading, but the upgrade was too expensive for us. Getting to food at the bottom of our large top loading freezer is virtually impossible. We can only eat what is on top, so sometimes we have weird meals like stir fry and garlic bread because that is what was accessible. We wish there wasn’t a sump pump in the mid-stateroom shower, but that is the way it comes.
Our biggest complaint is the ventilation down below. On a passage, we close all the portholes except the one in the mid-stateroom shower. We close the hatches. The front stateroom has dorad vents that only work well when the wind is on your nose. We have yet to have wind on our nose since leaving San Diego. The porthole in the shower doesn’t do a whole lot since there is no cross breeze. There is a blower in the mid-stateroom, which helps, but it is not quite powerful enough. The downstairs gets hot, stuffy, and smelly. The obvious remedy to the problem is running the air, but that has a couple of issues. First, the air conditioning turns itself off downstairs in rough waves, and second, when the wind blows from aft (most of the time for us), the generator exhaust smell creeps inside and permeates the boat, making the smell problem worse.