Author: Pete

Location: 08°13.420S 116°20.675W

Date: 11:00 April 10 to 11:00 April 11

 

Day 12 at sea.

Pretty excited to be beyond the half-way mileage mark. I’m hoping we’ve already passed the half-way time mark. Our first days motor sailing south to the trade winds from the Galapagos were pretty slow. We picked it up since we turned west. Our GRIB files do show lighter wind coming our way, which may slow us down in the coming days though. Already starting to feel the effects with 12 knots instead of 16, and calmer seas. Pros and cons for both. Easier sleeping, eating, reading, living, but slower, less free energy, possibly louder with sails not as full.

It’s interesting (depressing?) that we’ve been sailing west for 12 days and our longitude puts us pretty much south of San Diego! Only 1334 miles to go, but who’s counting?

Rocky connection the last days. Our SSB radio connection to send these emails comes from a tenuous link with certain relay stations around the world. You can only reach them at certain times of the day, depending on atmospheric conditions. We generally use the Panama station, 2000 miles away, at 4.073 MHz, but also occasionally use Rock Hill, South Carolina, some 3000 miles away. We connect best at this time of night at 10.329 MHz. Sometimes we can link through San Diego, Honolulu, or Chile. Pretty neat, if old school technology. You listen to see if anyone is transmitting, an annoying clicking/chirping sound, then try to connect. The computer talks to the Pactor II modem which clicks quietly, talking in turn to the ICOM 802 radio. A little display shows when you’ve made a connection and data starts flowing in small, nay, miniscule, packets. We sailmail users call ourselves the ‘Bandwidth Impaired’.

Depending on the traffic transmission and receiving takes 4-15 minutes. Sometimes it requires 5-10 tries to connect. Other times it’ll pick up on the first attempt. Depends on the time of day and how much traffic from other boats is squeezing through these connection points. The system works pretty well once the kinks are ironed out. Successful transmission also relies on fairly full batteries; under 12.4V in the batteries, say 1/3 of the tank, and the power-hungry antenna won’t broadcast with the necessary wattage to punch through a couple thousand miles of atmosphere. When you’re transmitting on certain frequencies, the signal is powerful enough to light some of the LEDs around the boat in choppy patterns. It’s a little ghostly.

Our last fresh meat in spicy tacos tonight. No fish, but it sounds like our entire flotilla is striking out. Aside from my atrocious fishing skills, all good on Tayrona.

Seems as though we only catch ‘em if they jump into the boat…. Guess that means we’re following the Ernie and Bert school of fishing techniques.

 

Author: Pete

Location: 07°03.742S 106°38.596W

Date: 11:00 April 6 to 11:00 April 7

 

Day 8 at sea.

One third done! 1000 miles in the bag! That’s the distance from Michigan to Miami, 48 hours driving straight. The passage from Galapagos to Marquesas is approximately 3000 miles, so 2000 to go, or about the distance from New York to San Francisco.

We still have plenty of food, water, books, and snacks, so don’t worry about us. On sunny, windy day we churn out about 12 gallons of fresh water, so we haven’t even broken into our 300 liter onboard tanks yet.

 

I’m always impressed with how devoid of scent the high seas are. I always expected it to smell like the salty, sea sprayed lighthouse piers of New England or the low tide plains of a delta in the Gulf. Nope. Neutral. So then everything else in the boat smells that much stronger. The home made bread toasting on the stove, coffee in the press, oiled tools under the bunks, musk of damp towels drying, sort-of recently washed hair, fishing lures in the tackle box.

 

Tayrona cruises along happily without much interference from us. Haven’t touched the sails aside from putting in a reef at night and shaking it out in the morning. Reminds me of that infomercial, ‘Set it! And! Forget it!’ We don’t forget it though. No lights on the horizon for a few nights, but Wavelength reported a cargo ship passing 6 miles from them last night, so we can’t get complacent about our night watches. Or day watches, for that matter.

 

Reefing is a pretty easy task with the in-mast roller furling. No need to go on deck, one person can handle putting in or taking out a reef. This also allows for more delicate sail trim, unlike slab reefing which requires you to decrease the sail are by 1/3, then 1/2, or the like.

 

Cloudy skies tonight and a fresh breeze. But we have wind in the sails and charge into the batteries. Makes for a happy captain.

 

 

Between the wind and towing generators, we charge at about 12 amps during the day, and 2 amps at night. Haven’t seen significant discharge, even with the water maker going. Haven’t run the diesels or gas generator yet, and don’t expect to. Nice to have the surplus, free power.

Popcorn and board games- one of our favorite ways to end a day at sea.