Day 2 complete. On passage, we don't count days by the wall clock — we count them in 24-hour blocks from the moment we left the dock. So "Day 2" runs Monday 10:30 to Tuesday 10:30 local, and the calendar can sort itself out when we get there.
The headline today is that there isn't one, which out here is exactly what you want. We held the same quiet groove: 1,000 rpm, sipping 2.4 gallons an hour, the boat ticking off miles like she's been doing this her whole life. An uneventful day at sea is a well-run day at sea, and I'll take a string of them all the way to the Azores.
The big event was fishing — or, more accurately, the attempt at fishing. Jake (4) appointed himself head of tackle selection and insisted we audition every single lure we own for trolling, one after another, with the unshakable confidence of a man who has never been wrong. The fish disagreed with all of them. In our defense, the water's warming up but it's still only about 70°F, so I wasn't expecting much of a feeding frenzy. Jake remains optimistic. We'll be back at it tomorrow.
Traffic thinned out noticeably — just six ships spotted all day, a sign we're getting properly offshore. We watched a few small squalls march around the horizon, close enough to be pretty and far enough to stay someone else's problem.
In the evening we gave her a 45-minute run-up to clean out the pipes — the daily high-load burn that keeps the diesel from getting sooty and sulky at our low cruising load. While I was at it, I fired up the watermaker and topped us up with 75 gallons. Yes, a family of four goes through a lot of water, and yes, I top off daily whether we strictly need it or not — water in the tank is peace of mind, and peace of mind is cheap insurance out here.
Then nightfall decided we'd had it too easy. The wind came up straight on the starboard beam at 25–27 knots and kicked up some genuinely square, short-period waves — the kind that hand you a "nice" roll and make you reacquaint yourself with one hand for the boat at all times. It eased around 3 a.m., and the seas finally lay down by about 6. Everyone's fine, nothing broke, and the boat shrugged it off the way she always does.
Onward to the Azores.
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— Chris & the crew of Next Chapter