Author: Pete

Location: 09°15.981S’ 130°03.656W’

Date: 11:00 April 17 to 11:00 April 18

Day 19 at sea.

The wind was low again today, so we motored through the calm. Made for good reading. The last day we motored on this trip was April 1st. This is pretty cool for us since we’ve been under renewable power (solar, wind, towing) and haven’t had to use the engines, or gas generator for over 2 1/2 weeks! Think about not using ANY power for 2 1/2 weeks in your house. Feels good to have a balanced boat, despite our loads, mostly the watermaker, refrigeration, and autohelm, but also electronics, and lights. We’ve had it balanced at anchor, but having the towing generator pumping out ~3-4 extra amps makes all the difference at sea. We could have gone longer too, but we fired up the engines for propulsion. The batteries were getting a little low in the last days since we had low wind, boat speed, and cloudy skies. We didn’t make water in the last 2 days. So we’re happy to have excess energy for a bit, as well as hot water for showering.

The wind came back up this evening. I helped Miranda put up the sails at 22:00 when the squalls died down and the wind filled in more consistently. Now we’re reaching at six knots in 13 knots of wind. Happy to be under sail again.

We don’t worry too much about the days racking up with slow transit. Although a boat in our fleet, Tallulah Ruby, has done this passage in 16 days, our friend Nadine took 29 days to do it. Another boat we’ve heard of skipped Galapagos and went straight from Panama, taking a whopping 55 days at sea! Yikes.

We’ve been finding a couple flying fish on deck most mornings. After one particularly rowdy night, Felix found nine aboard in the trampoline! They flap around and leave fish scales sloughed off on the deck as they try to flop back into the water. You don’t often look at your hull sides when you’re on a passage, but I began to notice that there is fish scale spatter in concentrated patches all over the hulls, even on the inside up under the trampoline. The schools of flying fish get spooked by the boat and try to buzz away to safety, only to slam into our hulls, occasionally ending up on deck too. There must be many of them careening head-long into our boat, because there are 3 or 4 square foot patches of clinging scale all over. They look like shimmering feathers in the sunlight. Eventually it’ll look like Tayrona is molting. Gross.

Luckily for us (unluckily for them, I suppose) at least we can “recycle” the poor buggers at bait fish.

Tonight is moody and cloudy, with chop coming in broadside to the boat. Makes for a jerky night. All good aboard.