June 21, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 19

We have had incredible sailing today - at one point we surfed up to 12.9 knots, which is a new record for us. From 20 miles out we can see Fatu Hiva, shrouded in clouds. But neither of us feels any sense of anticipation. We just crossed the biggest ocean, completing the longest passage that either of us is likely to make, and somehow landfall seems anticlimactic. At this point the passage making seems more important than the destination, which is a complete 180 from the way we felt after our run to the Caribbean last Fall - then the passages were to be endured for the sake of reaching a destination. For a brief moment this afternoon I wanted to keep going, to continue this self-contained bubble that we've been living in for the past few weeks. But thoughts of ice cream and fresh baguettes quickly chased any such sentimental nonsense away.

Later . . . We arrived at the harbor after dark. We were a bit skittish about entering after our scary experience at Isabella. But this bay is wide open, no reefs on which to worry about running aground. As we came into the bay, another cruiser came out in his dinghy to tell us about the holding and point out at good spot. Even with his guidance, the sound of waves crashing against the rocky shore around the bay made the shore seem very close after three weeks of not having anything near the boat (other than that buoy we tried to run down in the middle of the ocean). In the background, mingling with the sound of the shore pound, we could also hear the rhythmic beat of drums coming from the village at the head of the bay - had we stepped back 200 years into the pages of Melville?

We dropped anchor in 100 feet of water, with 250 of our 275 feet of chain out. After getting settled, we shared a bottle of wine and looked forward to sleeping (on fresh sheets!) in the same bed, at the same time for the first time in weeks. It feels a bit like Christmas Eve. We can see the outline of the rugged coast around us, but have to wait until morning to see what awaits us here. It is a bit like knowing the presents are under the tree, just waiting for us to unwrap them at dawn.

June 20, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 18

Today was a tough day for eating and drinking. We seemed to spill something each time either of us went near the galley. The icing on the cake was my knocking a drink over onto the computer, frying the keyboard. To cap off the day we saw a cockroach. We're so careful to throw out cardboard, it must have come aboard on our Panama fruit and veggies. Lovely. We are both quite ready for this passage to be done.

technical difficulties

Sorry about the radio silence this past week. We are fine. However, our computer had a bit of an accident. Over the past few days Sten has taken apart and reassembled it a few times, trying to get the keyboard to work. We're back in business since he discovered a mouse operated keyboard deep in the utilities files of our computer. We only have a touch pad mouse so it is very slow going but it is a whole lot better than nothing. We'll be catching up on email, but the blog updates will be delayed a bit longer.

June 19, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 17

Since all the interesting stuff on this passage seems to happen during Sten's watches, I asked him to write up the latest incident . . .

________________________

So last night was an interesting one. I (Sten) was on watch just before dawn watching Season 1 of Deadwood courtesy of Danika's sister. Every half an hour of so I would pause the DVD and stick my head up on deck, have a look around, check the radar, make sure I'm happy with the set of the sails, etc. I had seen on radar and later confirmed visually a ship about 12 miles off our starboard bow. From the combination of bright lights and a relatively weak radar return, I realized that I was looking at a commercial longliner. There are lots of these out here stripping the ocean of everything that swims. Anyway, to track the course of the ship, I was using a function of the radar called EBL. Basically, it allows you to put a mark on the initial target location, wait 10 minutes, make another mark on the new position and connect the dots giving you the course of the vessel relative to yours. I was also tracking the lights on the horizon visually. As long as the bearing to the target is changing you are not going to have a collision. I had seen the lights move from 1 o'clock off our bow to 2:30 over a period of time so the bearing was definitely changing. It appeared that they were heading east. I also determined from the radar that the closest they would pass up would be over 4 miles. So no problem, two vessels pass safely in the night.

Imagine my surprise when I come on deck 20 minutes later and the ship is right next to us, maybe a quarter mile away. One thing to understand is that it is not necessarily easy at night to make out what direction a ship is going based on its lights. In this case, the colored running lights were lost in the glow of the deck lights and my panic seeing the ship so close. It soon became clear that we were on converging courses with both of us heading west. Due to our wing-on-wing downwind setup, I couldn't just head up and away from the collision course. I ran down and awoke Danika out of a very sound sleep, turned on our big deck light and went back on deck. I tried hailing the ship several times over the VHF, but they didn't respond. Possibly nobody on the bridge spoke English. It was unnerving not being able to communicate with them. We assumed that they could see us and wouldn't run us down, but we wanted to head up and get out of their way. I harnessed up and went forward to set the lines up to allow us to bring the jib to the other side of the boat and head up. My perception during this period was that we got closer and then paralleled courses, matching speed for something like 5 minutes before they changed course to starboard (right) and increased speed away from us. What had happened to my supposedly routine passing? Did the ship turn when it got close to us to take a closer look at us? Was it actually not moving originally and got underway at some point when I was down below? Were they herding us way from their longlines? We will never know for sure but I'm done taking these things for granted until the lights are fading into the distance.

June 18, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 16

It is a beautiful day. We have been making excellent progress to the west, close to 180nm per day, running wing on wing with the yankee (our working jib) poled out to windward in 14-18 knot winds from the east. Our boat speed is averaging around 7 knots in these conditions but we have surfed at speeds up to 9.7 knots in the heavier wind/ swell conditions. We are less than 600 miles from Fatu Hiva, where we hope to make landfall by the end of the week. As we get closer to land, we are seeing more bird life. It is nice to have some company out here again.

June 17, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 15

Every morning we find flying fish on deck. This is the littlest one yet:

Last night the wind piped up and with it the seas built to the point that the autopilot was getting marginally overwhelmed by the combination of the sea state and higher wind. We were fine as long as we stayed deep down wind but when a big swell would kick the stern down, heading us up, the apparent wind would move way forward, reducing the pressure on the jib and increasing the pressure on the main, causing the pilot to use lots of rudder to bring us back down on course. We put a second reef in the main, which in this situation effectively moves the center of effort on the sails forward, helping the boat stay pointed down wind. The squall activity ceased around sunset, making night watch pretty uneventful though we are on the lookout as we have heard boats reporting squalls up to 40 knots on their approach to the Marquesas.

The seas settled down a bit today, so I took the opportunity to bake, making sticky buns. It was my first time working with a really wet dough. Mixing it by hand was the best workout I've had in, oh, 15 days. The yeasty smell of the dough rising and the buttery, rummy smell of the syrup as it caramelized was enough to make us salivate, long before they were ready to eat. Just as the buns came out of the oven, Sten landed a nice small Mahi this afternoon, which made us glad that we had released the huge bull Mahi-Mahi we had on the line this morning - it was easily as large as the one we landed on the approach to Bonaire and way too big for the two of us. We had been hoping for a Wahoo for a little variety but probably will not need to fish again until a day or so before we get in.

June 16, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 14

I brought this upon myself. Clearly, my statements about being bored in yesterday's post must have ticked off some weather god. We've spent the day paying for my discontent. Just after midnight, squall lines started marching across our track. Just before dawn, a squall swept through, accompanied by a wicked wind shift. We had our first accidental jibe of the crossing, breaking the jerry-rigged rigid boom vang, blowing out the temporary 4-to-1 block vang system, and tearing out one of the bimini supports. Not bored anymore! We scrambled to furl in the jib, tie down the various pieces of the rigid vang and re-rig the jerry-rigged temporary vang. The damage was actually pretty minimal. The preventer did its job and kept the boom from swinging more than a few feet across.

Squalls marching across our path:

I had been sleeping, off watch, when the squall hit. I scrambled onto deck without dressing or grabbing any foul weather gear. Within moments of working in the driving rain I was shivering. Sten, just in a pair of shorts, was also cold and wet. Just after that first squall, we were down below having coffee, trying to warm up, when we heard a hissing noise. We looked at each other, alarmed, wondering what could have punctured. As I sniffed for propane and checked the bottle of refrigerant in the engine room, Sten went up to the cockpit to check the jerry cans. He discovered that one of our life vests had inflated. They are designed to automatically inflate if you fall in the water. We had gotten wet enough in the rain to trigger the inflation. We've never inflated one before, so this is a pretty good test of how long it will remain inflated. 10 hours later and it is still pretty firm.

The squalls have continued on and off all day. Watch tonight will certainly be more demanding than it has been lately.

June 15, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 13

Mata'irea has a new 24 hour distance record - her latest noon to noon mileage was 187. We have now been at sea longer than on any of our prior passages. We've both reached a state of complete boredom. Each of us has taken to having a long nap in the afternoon to eat up some of the time. The boat is sailing itself. Other than jibing a few days ago when the wind shifted, and jibing back 24 hours later when it shifted back, a maneuver that took 30 minutes each time because we had to reset the whisker pole, we haven't had to touch the sails. Last night we did put in one reef in the main to make our ride a bit more comfortable, but that only took a few minutes (even with the added steps of clipping into a harness to go out on deck to ease and reset both the preventer and the temporary vang). The good news is that the wind is consistently blowing between 15 and 25, and if it stays like this, we'll make landfall in a week. But we expect it to lighten up as we get closer to landfall, so it will probably be a bit longer than a week.

June 14, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 12

We had our slowest 24 hour run of the trip yesterday. But last night the wind came back, and now we're making great progress towards the Marquesas. I've got my fingers crossed for a midnight to midnight mileage record. Our excitement of the day came in the form of an equipment failure. A wire cable integral to the rigid boom vang parted, to the tune of two loud bangs. We both looked around for a minute trying to figure out what had happened, before Sten noticed the frayed cable. We set back up the temporary 4-to-1 purchase system that we first employed when the rigid vang pulled out of the boom during the run from Aruba to Panama. Then Sten replaced the frayed wire with two sections of line. We don't quite trust it to hold, so we're keeping the temporary system rigged to share the load with the rigid boom vang.

June 13, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 11

We are half way to the Marquesas, with 1500 miles left to go. As Sten's dad put it last night, 'we are as far from land as it is possible to be.'

June 12, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 10

The temperature of the equatorial waters around the Galapagos was in the lower 70s. For the first few days of our crossing, before we got below 5 degrees south, the water temperature remained in the 70's as we rode the cold water currents west. As we got farther south our weather improved - we went from grey, cloudy days and damp night watches to bright, sunny days and a dry comfortable cockpit through the night. Once we got below 5 degrees south, and out of the currents surrounding Darwin's islands, the water temperature shot up to the high 80's, making us feel like we had arrived back in the tropics. Which was all well and good, until the wind died. As Sten said yesterday, "Bring on the sweat." Our last noon-to-noon mileage was our lowest of the trip - 127 miles, down from a string of days where our average mileage was in the 160's and 170's. We have several more of these low mileage days to look forward to before we get out of this wind hole.

Whether it was triggered by the heat or the prospect of another two weeks of flopping about out here, I started craving ice cream today. After a while of contemplating which flavor I would like most, I asked Sten for an ice cream maker as an anniversary present. After a debate about whether we could make ice cream out of UHT milk, I tabled the request until we could settle the point [Hey John D - any interest in whipping up a test batch of long-life milk ice cream?].

June 11, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 9

The Pacific Ocean is vast. The very word seems to have been created to describe this ocean. It is the largest ocean in the world, measuring 11,000 miles east to west and 9,000 miles north to south. And it is empty. Since leaving the near shore offshore waters, we have only seen a few ships and one other sailboat. Dolphins have only visited us once, and birds are few and far between. And yet, in the midst of all this vast emptiness, we nearly managed to hit something.

We've sailed into a hole, an area of very little wind, which our latest weather chart suggests we may be stuck in for the next few days. With less wind, the sails slat loudly as we roll in the swell. The noise is grating, and the motion is not good for the rigging. Sten had just gotten out of the cockpit to tighten up the preventer when he noticed a weather buoy about 100 yards off our port bow. "Holy shit," he exclaimed. We would have hit the thing if we hadn't immediately altered course. Then he whooped, "we're going to catch some mahi here - they love things like this." In the next moment he saw a fish break next to the boat. Then the reel on the rod whirled as it paid out line and the two handlines snapped taut. We landed three 8 to 10 pound mahi, and kept two of them.

June 10, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 8

Yesterday tuna managed to hit both of our lures, causing one of them to ricochet forward and hit the transom of the boat. As the boat pulled one of the tuna forward on the other lure, he crossed paths with the line of lure launched by the other tuna. The line wrapped around his head, cut into his gills, and garroted him. He fought us as we hauled in both handlines, bloody spray flying. His death spasms set in before we could get him to the boat. Even before we gaffed him, his jaw was already detached by the power of his fight against the line that had strangled him. The tragedy of it all is that it was a huge fish, at least 30 pounds, but we don't like the meat from skipjack, and we still had yellowfin, which we do like, on board. So we threw him to the sharks. We both feel terrible about the waste.

Today, Sten set out one line and picked up a mahi-mahi, one of our favorites. I should mention that the first thing that happens, after Sten yells "fish on," is that he drops his pants. This comic ritual is a courtesy to me as laundress-in-chief. I'm not fussed about boxers stained with fish blood, but back in the Caribe, I got a bit testy about trying to get blood stains out of too many ruined pairs of shorts. This is why Sten is only wearing boxers in most of the fish trophy shots.

My great provider also set about making cardamon rolls today, from his grandmother's recipe. Six months ago he bought a bag of whole white cardamon pods in a spice market in St. Martin, with these rolls in mind. Last night he picked the seeds out of the pods and ground them in a spice mill. Now that he has taken over the baking, I'm not left with much to do around here, so I spent the day studying French. I can now say, "the boy sits under the plane," however much use that will be on an island without an airport.

June 9, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 7

Yesterday afternoon, I lazed in the cockpit reading and watching the laundry dry on the lifelines, as the setting sun turned the water into a sheet of crumpled tinfoil, thinking 'this is not a bad life.'

Yesterday was laundry day aboard Mata'irea. While I did several loads in the tub, Sten worked on some additional upgrades to our SSB installation. Of course, the shower drain pump chose the worst possible time to flake out, as I filled and drained the tub over a dozen times. So every few minutes I would interrupt Sten's project with "Honey, could you work the pump?" and he would stick his head into the engine room and do some magic to get the balky thing to drain the tub, one more time.

In between all of my interruptions, he installed a piece of tinfoil, paralleling an existing ground wire, between the ground stud on the SSB and the copper foil glassed into the hull. Today, he ran a piece of tinfoil between the antenna tuner and the copper ground grid. He also noticed that there were low, medium and high settings on the SSB. We're not sure what setting we were using before, but we have it set at high now. Yesterday, he also hooked up the secondary GPS antenna to the VHF and today he hooked it up to the Pactor modem. He needs a part that we don't have on board to complete the hookup to the SSB.

We're so far from any of the sailmail stations (the closest is Panama - over 1500 miles away) that we're taking a long time (up to 30 minutes) to receive and send messages each day. The slow connection is what has inspired Sten to modify our setup. We're only allotted 90 minutes per week of connection time. So if you don't hear from us for a day or two, don't panic.

This morning Sten was checking the running rigging for chafe and noticed the pin connecting the whisker pole to the pole lift car on the front of the mast was just about to fall out. Somewhere along the way we lost the circle clip that keeps the top of the pin from sliding down. If the pin had fallen out, we surely would have suffered some damage from the pole slamming about. He repaired it by twisting locking wire into the groove around the top of the pin.

June 8, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 6

During our trek up the volcano on Isabella, James (one of the two volunteer English teachers) made the comment that he was a traveler, not a tourist. I hadn't previously considered the distinction. This morning I came across a scene in a Paul Theroux book that delineates the difference, with humor. Theroux is on a flight across the Pacific, when the man sitting next to him says, "I've been all over the Pacific . . . Bora-Bora. Moora-Moora. Tora-Tora. Fuji."
"Fiji," his wife said.
"And Haiti," he told Theroux.
"Tahiti," his wife said, correcting him again. . . . "We're members of the Century Club. You can only join if you've been to a hundred countries."
"What does 'been to' mean?" Theroux asks. "Pass through the airport? Spend a night? Get diarrhea there?"
"Guess he's not a member!" the man says, joyously.
'Tourists don't know where they've been,' Theroux thinks. 'Travelers don't know where they're going.'

I don't know what category we fall in. Some islands we pass through so quickly that we don't get a real sense of the place. We hardly lingered longer in some ports than those vermin of the high seas - cruiseship passengers. Others, like Bermuda, we spent long enough to start to understand the people and their place. As one Bermudian told me, "After three weeks here, you are a local." But length of time spent somewhere can't be the determining factor. It would certainly be easy enough to spend two weeks at an all inclusive hotel and never talk to any locals other than those waiting on you - this is far too many Americans' experience of the Caribbean. Not much of an improvement was our experience of St. Maarten - during the month we were there last winter we spent most of our time (in bars, markets and marine stores) surrounded by other cruisers. I hope that we experience the Pacific islands as travelers, rather than tourists.

June 7, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 5

Last night sucked. I'm sure there is a more eloquent way to put it, but the unvarnished truth is that it blew. After dinner we were far enough south that we had to turn downwind and start heading west. We had a nice stiff breeze, but the main was blanketing the staysail and jib, so we had to bag and furl them, respectively. All this took place after dark, so rather than messing with the pole in the dark, on a wet foredeck pitching up and down in the swell, we decided to wait until morning to pole out the jib to the windward side. We were moving along well enough with just the main, for all of ten minutes. Then the wind promptly died.

As the wind filled back in over the next few hours it kept backing, so we needed to head farther and farther south to keep from jibing. As we altered course, practically back to the heading we had been on when we were going upwind, the waves started hitting us broadside. In retrospect we should have jibed, or, better yet, made our sail change earlier in the day. But we didn't. Instead we got knocked around all night long. Neither of us slept well off watch, and this morning we both looked beat. We got the pole up right after breakfast, and have been moving along nicely all day with the main and jib wing-on-wing.

Continuing yesterday's banana theme, dinner tonight is going to be crepes with nutella and sliced bananas. Yum. It seems unnatural, but we may actually put on weight during this passage.

June 6, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 4

During Sten's watch last night we crossed paths with a large cloud mass. He saw windspeeds of 20 knots for a few minutes, then as we came out the other side, the wind disappeared, as though the cloud had sucked up all the wind out of the surrounding area. We flopped about for a bit then he turned on the engine so that I could sleep. I'm like a baby being driven around the block in a car with that thing - turn it on and I'm out like a light. When I got up this morning the purplish grey cloud mass, the color of black Necco wafers, was still behind us causing the wind to swirl around, changing direction and speed. Although we are now at 06 degrees south, it is still a bit fickle. We were hoping to have more consistent winds at this latitude.

We are still not that far west. For reference, when we arrived in the Galapagos, we were in line with Jackson, Mississippi. Today we are on a parallel with Houston, at 096 degrees west.

We found more wasabi in the stores and Sten pickled some ginger, so the sushi crisis has been averted. The overripe produce of the day is bananas - the port stateroom may never be the same. So we are on a mission to use them up as fast as possible. This morning, Sten made banana pancakes, and I currently have a loaf of banana nut bread in the oven. We're also still working through that yellowfin tuna. Lunch was grilled tuna steaks with wasabi ginger finishing sauce and dinner is going to be a tuna picata recipe sent to us by one of our our readers - thanks! Clearly, we are not going to starve out here.

June 5, 2006 - Pacific Crossing, Day 3

Our first night out of Galapagos, I fed the fish. Today, it was Sten's turn to feel punky. He is feeling a bit better this evening.

We hit a 24 hour speed record on board Mata'irea yesterday - we covered 163 miles. But the wind has died down again and we are rolling SSW looking for more consistent tradewinds. Getting to the Marquesas from Galapagos requires us to travel approximately 10 degrees south and 50 degrees west. We have already completed half of our southing. We are getting anxious to find stronger wind so that we can crack off and start heading west.

The peppers we picked up in Santa Cruz were starting to go, so our big project of the day was pickling them, together with carrots, zucchini, and onions, so that we'll have some semi-fresh veggies later in the passage.

June 4, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 2

We have had a terrific start to this passage. We expected to have to motor south for a few days to find the wind, but after a few hours it piped up and we were able to turn off the engine. We are doing well over 8 knots right now with the assistance of the current. We are close reaching into a six foot swell, but the motion is not too bad. Mostly, we are really happy about not having to use our diesel this early in the trip.

In a straight line the trip is 2971nm but we will be heading SSW to get down into the strong trade wind belt around 6 south before hanging a soft right onto a SW heading until 9 or 10 south. This will add a few hundred miles to the trip. Sten crunched some numbers the other day and figured out that our worst case scenario is 30 days. But we are hoping for something closer to 24 days.

Sten kept his boredom at bay today by tackling a problem that we have had for months with our SSB. If we tried to talk or send email over the SSB while the autopilot was on, the boat would veer wildly off course. The problem stems from the fact that the power cable for the autopilot hydraulic pump, the SSB antenna cable and a cable that controls the SSB tuner run through the same piece of conduit from the nav station to the back of the boat. We previously tried snapping a bunch of fair-rites around the lines to cut down on interference, but that had a negligible effect. So he changed the termination point of our SSB tuner ground from an equipment ground to an SSB ground, so now it is connected to the SSB counterpoise, a piece of approximately 100 square feet of copper foil that is glassed into the hull of the boat under the waterline. Afterwards I successfully sent out a bunch of emails with the autopilot still on.

Meanwhile, I spent the day reading cruising guides and travel guides to start coming up with a rough itinerary for our three months in French Polynesia. Oh yeah, and we gorged ourselves on yellowfin sashimi for lunch. With over 10 pounds of fish in the fridge, we'll be having it for most of our meals the next few days. Could someone please come visit us in the Marquesas? I'm going to be in desperate need of a new supply of wasabi by then.

June 3, 2007 - Pacific Crossing, Day 1

We left Isabella just before noon this morning. We are motoring south west to find the wind. Just offshore we saw a green turtle and a few whales. We also caught two yellow fin tuna. They were both so big that we let one go. After the excitement of the tuna catch had faded, Sten was looking a bit restless. I asked him what was wrong and he explained that he had no idea how he was going to entertain himself for the next three to four weeks. But we have loads of books and DVDs, the latter thanks to my sister who has burned a bunch of movies and shows for us, to keep us entertained. And if we're looking for intellectual stimulation, we have some French language software.