Passage to Fiji: Day 4

Author: Pete
Location: 18°32.475S’ 178°34.237E’ EAST!

Day 4 at sea en route to Fiji.

Crossed the international dateline just after dusk last night. Tayrona is officially a time machine! I guess I’ve known that for a while. Time either flashes by in a blink, say when you’re sipping gin and tonics on the trampoline watching a sunset in a secluded anchorage, or it drags infinitely on, like when you’re sailing to Fiji. In nerd speak it’s called ‘time dilation’, but it’s definitely not because we’re moving at relativistic speeds. Now we’re as far east as you can get before you’re west!

Our Garmin Blue charts break at the international dateline and you have to scroll to the other side of the world to see what comes next. So just before we crossed 180 degrees of longitude it look like we were going to sail off the edge of the earth. Here be monsters!

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Last night was also nice enough to reinstate the starlight dance party on deck. It’s been on hiatus due to the ugly weather on passage pretty much all the way from Bora Bora. What’s up with that? This is supposed to be the Coconut Milk Run! It was an exciting night; as we were rounding Great Astrolabe Reef to the north a boat showed up on radar and pulled past us on a near parallel course just two miles off our port. As soon as it cleared us another boat rounded the light and came almost directly at us, passing a mile off our starboard. They were easy to see with no danger of collision, but after 2000 miles without sighting a single craft “it was all very exiting” to have the AIS squawking and the radar lighting up surface contacts in the dark.

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It’s just in the last twelve hours we’ve started feeling human again. The first days on passage one feels like something akin to steamed polenta. Our four-hour shifts aren’t terrible, but it takes some time to get used to parceling your sleeping time. I’m on the 10AM-2PM, 6PM-10PM, and 2AM-6AM shift. Taking two out of the three dark shifts suits me. The boat goes through cycles of skipping smoothly over the waves like a kid on a bump-jumper, bubbles gurgling under the keels, punctuated by the wave-besieged shuffle of an army crawl. Our inner ears are winning the battle against the boat’s motion. We’re naturally bracing against anything available as we lurch around the boat without thinking about it. Miranda can read even in heavy seas pretty much the second day on passage. I take more warming up, hence all my sp#ll0ng er^gors.

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Passage to Fiji: Day 3

Author: Pete
Location: 18°28.010S’ 179°05.262W’

Day 3 at sea en route to Fiji.

Last night was a fun game. At around two in the morning we entered Fijian waters marked by a string on low islands running north to south. We were cutting due west through the Oneata Pass, a four mile wide cut between Oneata Island and an unnamed, barely submerged reef. They’re both marked clearly on the charts, but because of our speedy first days we were disconcertingly making the pass in the middle of the night. As usual, it was dark, no moon, heavy cloud cover, and no navigational beacons. The wind was ripping twenty plus knots and we were making seven knots of headway. In our defense, the pass is plenty wide and thousands of feet deep, though it comes up abruptly right at the reefs on either side, so you wouldn’t know things were getting tight based on depth until you were in trouble.

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The wind and towing generators screaming, we had plenty of energy to keep the radar lighting up the darkness continuously for several hours as we made our run. I felt like a submarine captain in an old war movie. It was too dark to see anything out of the port windows so my only view of the outside world from my tin can were the glowing chart plotter and sweeping radar screen with its yellow blobs of certain reef death. Charts in this neck of the woods have been known to be off by up to a few miles, so I was constantly checking our theoretical distance from the island with what the radar was showing. I knew I should be drinking diesel fuel coffee and chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes in true sub-captain style, but chips and salsa were the nervous munching item of choice. Snacks made it feel sort of like watching your own bad movie as you’re filming it.

To make the scene more like Das Boot, the seas boomed against the hull, shaking us and making it sound down below deck like depth charges were going off left and right. To make things more authentic, the towing generator kept making that groaning of a metal hull creaking under immense pressure. The situation became dire when we got a call from the engine room that we’d burned through the last jar of salsa. To make matters worse, damage control reported that the rest of the chips had given out. Damn the Tostitos! Full speed ahead!

I got my start in such undersea endeavors building a submarine with my buddy Mike out of the Bentleys’ plastic barrel in the back yard and ‘testing’ it in the neighborhood pool before taking it out for lake trials and ultimately sinking in it. I’m still amazed that we survived any of that nonsense, but it sure came in handy out here tonight.

All fooling aside, we glided right between the two unfriendly, unseen masses, two miles from the Oneata reef and two from the unnamed reef south… I think. A sliver of moon peeked over the horizon just before dawn.   A few hours later, after Miranda had relieved me of my watch, the sun was up and beaming through blue skies.

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No further funny business during the day, just a lot of podcasts, opening coconuts on a rolling boat with a machete, and keeping an eye out for islands. The tricky buggers sneak up on you. More from Tayrona to come.

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Passage to Fiji: Day 2

Author: Pete
Location: 18°35.538S’ 176°30.950W’

 

Day 2 at sea en route to Fiji.

We got a sliver of moon early this morning and a handful of stars peeking though the overcast as dawn broke. No sunrise, just a gradual lightening of the gray.

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The wind and waves evolve through the hours, holding a pattern for a while then throwing us a change up. I feel like our bodies are locked in a game of espionage with the ocean. The evil Axis of Wind and Waves alters the sea state and our bodies work feverishly to try and decipher the motion of the boat like code breakers hacking the Enigma machine. Then a couple hours after we become accustomed to the rhythm of one motion, the wind will veer slightly, or the wave period will increase, and our inner ears are back to smoking cigarettes in dimly lit rooms in the Pentagon.

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This afternoon the cloud cover broke slightly and patches of blue punctuated the gray. The sun ripped through the curtains for a gorgeous sunset. Still, the wind isn’t holding back, we’re seeing gusts to 23 and seas to match. We’ve had a few of those really good ones that clip the boat on just the right angle, kick us up into the air and wash over the top of the coach roof. I’ve adopted the McGurn method of operation in uncomfortable situations, which I learned many years ago from the mastermind when we were surfing in Lake Superior. Just before Ian (the the method’s developer) nosed over the top of an icy barrel and was crushed along the stony bottom, I heard him emit a faint, “Fun gaaaame!” Later he explained that by such vocalizations in uncomfortable circumstances one can trick the mind into thinking it’s in the midst of a more pleasurable experience, like as playing a fun game, instead of being hammered into the lake bottom. I’m working on my technique now; when we get one of those really good waves that shudders the boat and bastes us from stem to stern, I’ve taken to visualizing that I’m on a log ride at one of those summer water parks and squealing, “Wheeeee!”  My outbursts are more startling to Miranda than the actual wave, but I swear it’s working.

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We’re making better time than calculated and all is well aboard.  The water rushes by the hull, slapping and banging on the way.  It’s a bit unnerving to be dressing oneself with sleep-encrusted eyes take in a nice sunset view out the window, then the next instant be staring at the bottom of the sea.  All in the life of a sailing fool.

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