With the gooseneck repaired and the sails once again doing their thing, we settled into what can only be described as a low-drama westward slide. For a full week, from 17 to 24 April, Sunny Spells glided along in the company of a generous current, light trade winds, and the kind of quiet routine that long passages are made of.

The North Equatorial Current was firmly in our corner, pushing us along with up to 2 knots of extra speed over the ground. Combined with breeze in the 8–12 knot range, we regularly made 6–7 knots without touching a line. Day after day of this — no squalls, no sail changes, no stress. Just reading, firmware tweaking, eating well, and checking how far we’d drifted while asleep.

By the 19th we were deep in “miles quietly earned” mode. The kind of sailing where you forget you’re underway until you check the chartplotter and realize you’ve made 150 miles without trying. No other boats, no land in sight, just the soft hiss of water past the hull and the occasional slap of a lazy swell.

From the 21st onward, we began seeing more signs of equatorial life: a handful of flying fish in the scuppers, a few visits from dolphins, and a rising sense that the Galápagos weren’t impossibly far away anymore. The full moon faded, and the skies turned darker at night, which made for stargazing of the “planetarium” variety. Not bad when you’re brushing your teeth under Orion’s Belt.

By the 23rd and 24th, the wind was softening slightly but the current held steady. Boat speed dropped to the low 5s, but we didn’t mind. With good power from the sun, steady progress west, and an autopilot that hadn’t glitched in days, we were firmly in the groove. We began looking ahead to landfall — not quite in range yet, but real now. It’s a strange transition: watching Galápagos grow from an idea on the horizon into an actual waypoint on the chart.

There will be more drama in time — there always is — but this stretch was a rare treat: seven days of silence, sun, and slow, steady progress west across an empty ocean. We’ll take it.