Looking outside of the PRT window in looking at the sun about to set. Maybe 5 – 10 min more and the sun is behind the horizon. It became real magnificent sunset, which we both watched in its last minutes.

Behind this horizon the Kontiki crew around Thor Heyerdahl saw the sun going down in the last nights before the successful end of their epic sail from the South American continent to Polynesia with they proofed that it is possible that the Polynesien Island were populated from people from South America.

History says that they understood they need to get the right wave to cross over the eastern reef of Raroia Island to make a safe arrival in the lagoon. To achieve this, they used all what they could use as drift anchor to slow Kontiki sufficiently down and then cut all these things off to make it with the right wave over the reef.

Raroia Island is located at 16 deg 07 min S 142 deg 25 min W.
We passed this island today at distance of 270 NM. For us it would be 1 1/2 d. How long did it take for Kontiki?

…. and the night.

MaRe got her night gown rather early today. When wanted to start the work there was nice wind blowing coming from a big low hanging cumulus nimbus cloud at our port side. MaRe accelerated to top speed of more than 8 – 9 KN. It was just fun to see her ploughing through the sea. So we talked about the clouds for a while until the influence of the cloud was gone. We then did the normal procedure for getting reef 2 into the main sail. Now I hope we get enough wind to make it with more than 6 KN in average through the night. There are few clouds hanging ahead of us. Thus there is a chance for “cloud riding”.

Night routine started; I’m taking the first watch starting at 1900.