Author: Pete

Location: 09°04.752S 128°06.807W

Date: 11:00 April 16 to 11:00 April 17

Day 18 at sea.

Sailing through lines of squalls today with generally light winds. At some point we were only making 2 knots, so we did some swimming/dragging off the transom, trailing a line to haul ourselves back to the boat. Foolishly, the line we chose to drag was dark blue. Jumping in, I found myself with the rapture of the deep, looking straight down into cerulean blue thousands of feet straight down. Upon surfacing, I realized that the dark blue line blended in nicely with the dark blue water and the boat was moving away. Liza pointed at the line and I swam that way with plenty of time to grab it. Will use white line next time. Also, two knots doesn’t feel like much when you’re on the boat, but trailing behind it on a rope, two knots is pretty fast. Enough to take your drawers off.

In the afternoon we couldn’t keep the spinnaker inflated as the true wind speed dropped below 4 knots so we doused it and fired up the iron gennies. Motoring is not without its merits. We charged up the batteries and everything else aboard and had hot showers all round!

It’s been fantastic flying the spinnaker for days on end. The boat looks nice and clean with the sails all furled up and the big blue, pink, and purple chute billowing out front, dragging us along downwind. It’s quiet, doesn’t luff or pop much even in very light wind. Not much trimming as long as she’s inflated. Makes for great afternoon shade of the hammock for reading and keeping watch. The following seas roll up under the boat and gush between the two hulls. It is, as they say, smooth sailin’.

We did get a fish bite yesterday evening! We all finished dinner with a great sunset and were all busying ourselves downstairs in the boat. We all heard the same zzzzz sound, but thought it was someone winching in a line, until we realized that we were all in the boat! So we ran outside and Felix tried to pull the line in with no avail. Too big to hand line! Couldn’t crank it with the reel either! Some sort of monster. It pulled out our spool for a few minutes, and then inexplicably spit the lure out. Or perhaps we ripped it free. Either way… something BIG was on the end of it. Not sure we could have eaten something that size!

In other exciting news, I saw a boat yesterday! It was a freighter heading almost are reciprocal course. I was at the bow watching the stars spin over the course of my three hour shift. There’s always a few near the horizon that look like boats, but in minutes they dive out of view. This one moved east along the horizon and over the course of a half hour I made out the bow light, then navigational lights. I lit it up with radar, not out of necessity on a clear night, but out of sheer interest. She passed five miles north of us making 13 knots according to our AIS. It didn’t register a name. In all these wide waters, five miles is pretty close. It’s all too easy to get complacent about the insulating, protective isolation. You almost feel indignant when someone sneaks over the horizon and into your little bubble.

But tonight it’s pretty quiet. Motoring through heavy rain. Radar and AIS are blazing away, so we shouldn’t have too many surprises. The wind and sea state are calm, making for an easy ride. More to come.