Indian Ocean Update - Zac

Latest Position: 11/11/08 0552Z 19 54.692S 58 44.971E

So now I am about 20 hours out of Port Louis with about 2 knots of wind and motoring along at 4.5 knots. I've never been so glad for a break of light wind. I am typing this using my shreaded genoa for a foot rest. I guess I had better tell you how it got to be this way.
It was about 10pm and I was sailing along under genoa alone. (I have been saving the repaired boom only for necessity.) I was going between 6-7 knots in a nice 25 knot Indian Ocean trade on the aft quarter. I had just layed down in my bunk and was awake listening to the sounds of the boat working when I heard a flapping noise on deck. It sounded like a flying fish or maybe a bird so I didn't bother to check it. A minute later, the motion of the boat changed. I went up in the cockpit and saw that the gennie was way too far off the boat. At this point my night vision hadn't quite kicked in yet. I thought that maybe the furling line had snapped and it had come all the way unfurled. I switched on the spreader lights and found my gennie 15 feet from the boat held by the furling line and the sheet. It looked like a spinnaker. As I looked at it I knew that I was in for one of those adrenalin-filled sleepless nights. The first thing I did was to grab the spinnaker halyard and fasten it to the bow for mast support. So I put the furling line around the winch and fell off the wind a little to take the wind off the sail. This worked pretty well except now I had to go and wrestle a flogging genoa over the lifelines and lash it to the deck. Around 1am I finally got it lashed down on a 1/2" thick U-bolt right behind where the forstay is fastened to the deck. It was under control enough to call my dad to see if he had any advice. He called some of the riggers who had worked on Intrepid in Marina del Rey and they thought that I should loosen the aft stay to give the forstay some slack to try and reattach it. I went back up on deck to try to furl the sail and after 3 hours I got it furled to 1/4 of it's size. It was 4 am and I was getting a little too tired to be on deck so I pulled up the main with a reef in it and went to sleep....
I'll have to finish the rest of the story later. My Monitor windvane doesn't steer well in such light wind and my tiller pilot burnt up. I have had to hand steer most of the past 24 hours. It was so calm last night that the stars were reflecting off of the water and I couldn't tell where the water and sky met. I have developed a new method of celestial navigation. I tied the tiller to my foot as I lay in the cockpit trying to get some sleep and stay on course, correcting my steering by the position of the stars.
I should be in Mauritius tomorrow morning.
Cheers,
Zac