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The wind continues in the 15 to 25 knot range. There are wind speed gusts in the low 30’. The main is reefed and un-reefed as necessary. We are getting very good at this. It’s really tough going. We think, maybe out loud, about other destinations, like American Samoa or Fiji where we don’t have to press so hard. We seem to be moving through very large squall lines. The sky is dark and ominous. Occasionally, the sky will break and we are treated to a bright star field.

When I was checking out the autopilot today I noticed that there was a lot of movement in the rudder shaft. Understandably alarmed we bore off to lessen the load on the rudder. There were two possibilities of where problems might exist: the lower bearing support was loose or damaged or the upper bearing support was loose or damaged. Since the lower support was in 5 feet of water I started with the upper bearing.  I popped the deck access point for the upper rudder bearing and saw to my amazement that 2 of the 4 rudder support bolts were completely out of their holes. I worked the bolts back into the hole and then crawled into the aft locker to see what was going on down there. I could not find the nuts for the bolts, so Lowry went to our spares supply and got two more and some thread lock.   With the nuts tightened and thread locked the movement in rudderpost was gone.