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Finally we left Southeast Asia behind and our "Pakia tea" enjoys her first deep sea voyage. The spray is flying from her bows and her foaming wash is forming a straight line through the Indian Ocean. We are in the middle between Phuket (Thailand) and Galle (Sri Lanka). After a short stop to visit the blue whales at Dondra Head - which we hopefully will find - we will continue towards the Maledives.

The first few days of the crossing we had moderate and changing winds with some more or less heavy squalls. A strenuous beginning since the waves also came from different directions at the same time. They were not high but nevertheless were shaking us a lot. However we don't complain since the wind never came foul. Anyways changing the sails was necessary all the time but this could not stop our slow progress in the right direction. The crew did very well and now we all have grown sea legs and the rocking of the boat doesn't bother us anymore. We finally found the northeast monsoon, which should continually blow at this time of the year - according to the weather forecast at least from now on it should blow reliably.

Besides we are testing one of our many technical possibilities on bord. With the prevailing northeasterly winds the sails would make a lot of shade onto our solar panels, so they can't produce a lot of power. But that's what we need so Sonja can bake us a nice chocolate cake with bananas. So we put down our electrical engines and use them as generators. With our current boat speed of 7-8 knots they produce between 500 and 800 watt, and so within 12 hours the same amount of power our solar panels produce on a sunny day. That's really great and we can look forward to our desert ;-)

Other than that there is not much to see . Once in a while some plastic garbage is drifting in the current but nothing really interesting for us marine biologists. At least we saw two terns and three small long-snouted spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris), which said hello one morning. But who knows what we will see during the rest of our crossing.

electric engines generating power