Author: Pete

Location: 09°54.877S 136°26.683W

Date: 11:00 April 20 to 11:00 April 21

 

Day 22 at sea.

The wind has filled back in, leaving us zipping along at 6.5 knots under full canvas in 14 knots of wind on a beam reach. Long period rollers come muscling through from the aft port quarter. We get a good push from them. The boat vibrates and hums happily as she reaches hull speed. Or hullS speed as it were.

With our current weather outlook and estimated resulting speed we’re projecting making landfall Wednesday (4/22/15) in the morning. We have to bleed off some speed between now and then so we don’t arrive before sunup and find ourselves stuck twiddling our thumbs offshore until we have enough light to enter the port. Entering a foreign harbor in the night is tricky business, unless they are well marked or well known. To make things even MORE fun, the Marquesas are a French, and the European navigational beacon colors are SWITCHED! In the US, you keep the RED lights on your RIGHT hand side when you’re RETURNING from sea (going into a harbor). Red Right Returning. European lights are reversed! So there’s a green light in the Hiva Oa harbor that marks the breakwall at the mouth of the harbor and you have to keep it on your LEFT when you’re returning from sea! That’d make a crushing end to your three week passage if you didn’t know that shiny bit of information! Stand off until sunup!

Tonight Miranda and I furled the mainsail and are running along under a reefed headsail only. She decided the best time to do so was in a pouring rain squall. She had time to put on her rain jacket before waking me up, halfway into her shift. Being woken up with howling wind and rain I generally react by screaming out of bed and on deck before I’m really awake. Or clothed. I was out there in my underwear and a life jacket, no headlight, reefing by feel in the downpour. Soaked my undies right through. I had to change ’em before going back to bed. So glamorous this sailing life. It did slow the boat down to 4.5 knots. We will spend the last hours of our VERY long journey doing the sailing equivalent of a drunken, loitering amble, designed to bob and shuffle us along in the waves until we make the harbor at sun up. Neat.

Many of our Tangaroa fleet are heading to Nuka Hiva, some 30 miles farther west. They’re planning to spend a lot longer in the Marquesas than we are, so they’ll have time to sail back windward to explore the island chain. Losers. How are you supposed to properly celebrate with flotilla if they don’t go to the right island? Regardless, we’re getting excited to see the islands on our horizon.

 

Author: Pete

Location: 09°20.505S 132° 03.359W

Date: 11:00 April 18 to 11:00 April 19

 

Day 20 at sea.

At this very moment we are 400 miles from Hiva Oa. The wind stayed low today, but constant today, going our way. Put up the spinnaker and ran downwind like a leaf on a pond. A really heavy leaf on a really, really big pond. Without much else to do on watch tonight, I crunched the numbers. If the boat was a leaf the size of your hand, a pond the size of our Galapagos-Marquesas passage would be 54 miles long. Go math!

 

Made a pretty good split pea and ham soup today for dinner. It has been easy to cook with the recent light seas. Or maybe we’re just getting used to the motion. I suppose after 20 days, you’d hope we’d get used to it. I’m afraid that after this trip we will all find ourselves propped next to solid objects when we stand still anywhere, as we are obliged to do on the boat. Try it. Sit, kneel, or lean any time you stop moving, and grab onto things for support as you walk around your house. It’s the behavior of a drunk man. We really perambulate like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Depth sounder reads last recorded depth once it can’t see the bottom anymore. It shows you that it can’t see the bottom anymore by blinking. So usually, the depth meter gives a blinking readout somewhere between 90 and 120 meters (~300 ft), where the sonar effectively lost the bottom. This transducer is not a fish finder. It’s only meant to read the bottom. We’ve sailed over schools of fish, dolphins, and frothy, wave whipped water, with no discernible change in the depth readout. Once in a while something spooky happens. The depth sounder will jump from 90 meters, to 3 meters, as if something was swimming under the boat. Something big. And it’s only there for a second, passing, and then is gone. But the depth sounder records the last position it saw the bottom, or something so big it appeared to be the bottom. Something 3 meters… some 10 feet under the boat. It’s blinking like that right now… Eventually we switch it off to reset it, but it’s a creepy feeling to see that happen.

Making contact through the Manihi station in the Tuamotu islands, French Polynesia. Bodes well for our progress. Clear night. Fabulous stars. Light wind and seas. All quiet and good aboard.

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.