We are still sailing and haven’t stopped since March 5th when we pulled up our anchor in the Galapagos, man that feels like a lifetime ago. We are into our third week at sea. Lots of people have asked me if we stop, no there is no stopping, there is nowhere to stop even if we wanted to. We haven’t seen land or another boat for over two and a half weeks now. It’s a beautiful big blue planet out here my friends. We are surrounded by an endless 360 degree horizon and a dome of blue sky above us. When we reach the horizon there is just more another endless horizon in front of us. We have been sailing due West for over ten days so every evening we are sailing into the sunset, each one is incredibly beautiful and different from the next as the cloud and light is constantly changing.
It’s just after midnight and we are ripping along through the darkness in a straight line for Hiva Oa. We have a lovely 23 knots of wind on a broad reach which is so welcome after a couple of really hot light wind days. It’s pretty amazing to think that you can cross an ocean and circumnavigate our entire planet using just the wind and some sails. Here’s what you do, after a couple of years of meticulous preparation, you just go down to the marina, get on your boat, pull up your sails and sail around the whole damn world. I can totally get my head around this. I realise that not everyone is cut out to do this but there is something critical in my make up that drives me to do this and the idea of this excites me no end.
Here’s what’s been happening over the last few days. The shallow water alarm has just gone off and I check the charts and see that we have 4000 metres of water below us. Either we just went over a really big dense school of fish or we drove right over the top of a whale or the electronics are acting up. Hitting sleeping whales or UFO’s is a real concern on ocean passages. UFO’s are unidentified floating objects, they could be containers or whales or anything else that may be floating out here. It’s impossible to see any of these things in the dark. When I was sailing from Bermuda to St Maarten with Pete, two days out from Bermuda during the day time we spotted a huge fin whale in front of us, it was spouting at regular intervals and moving very slowly. As we got closer we realized that this was a giant sleeping whale that was snoring! We sailed past quietly so as not to wake her and watched her snore and spray as we head off into the distance. Most of the body was submerged and would be impossible to spot at night. Many a boat has been sunk after hitting a sleeping whale.
Not sure what got me on that tangent but sufficed to say, out here we are small specs at the mercy of all the elements, the wind and the waves and whatever the ocean may decide to conjure up for us. Today the wind dishes up a few extra knots and throws a couple of extra metres of swell for good measure and I thrive on these elemental surprises. This makes for really exciting sailing hour after hour. After hours of night sailing at the helm in these conditions I am so high sleep is not easy and I can barely wait to get up on watch again.
Ocean crossings are full of challenges and promises. Every day is a learning day on a boat. No matter how many miles you have under your belt or how experienced you are stuff always comes up that you haven’t encountered before. I am in the orbit of people far more experienced than l and they are still all learning. I welcome all of these challenges as opportunities for learning and dive right in. I doubt whether my own progress and confidence in sailing in all conditions could be made without these steady unpredictable tests.These days it feels like the safest place on earth might actually be the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
I continued to try and further my understanding of celestial navigation and realise that this probably sounds quite boring but it is actually strangely mind bending and invites pause to think and absorb massive ideas about our place in the universe that could blow a circuit if not digested slowly. Let me share some random facts about celestial navigation with you. There are 57 navigational stars, one of them is called Betelgeuse but I call it Beetlejuice, I think it’s my favourite one. It is 290 million miles in diameter! Let’s all just stop and think about that for a minute. It is the reddish star that marks the left shoulder of the Orion constellation. The southern cross has been clearly visible on most nights on this crossing. In the pitch black as we surf down waves I look out hoping to catch a glimpse of Beetlejuice and know she is out there somewhere. Stefano gives a long winded explanation of how to do the calculations again and this time I think I caught 12 words before I just started staring out to sea looking for dolphins. He’s a very patient man.
Each day we watch the weather like hawks and download the updated weather every 12 hours. We study and compare several models to determine the best route. You can typically add 10 knots to any wind speed prediction for the gust and a third to wave height prediction. The various models all say different and sometimes conflicting things, “shit in, shit out” says Joerg, he doesn’t mince words. I’ll tell you the weather I say, nice and sunny 14 knots of wind from the south east, 3 metre swells, not a cloud in sight. I will give you an update in an hour I tell him and we laugh .You can spend hours poring over the models trying to make a best guess about where the most favourable conditions are. Let’s just sail I think.
Working on the bow this morning I almost got lifted clean off the deck and tossed out to sea when I was holding onto the partially furled Code 0 while Stefano was dealing with some tangled lines. A gust came up and filled the sail threatening to lift me off the deck. That’s how easily it happens I thought and stupidly I wasn’t clipped on. One of my friends was asking how we stay safe on deck. We never leave the cockpit without wearing a life jacket, harness and tether. The boat has lengths of webbing secured to the deck called jack lines that you clip into when moving up to the bow or working anywhere on the deck. There are also “D” rings at various places all over the boat and in the cockpit that you can clip into. In the middle of the night when it’s pitch black we would not go out of the cockpit or onto the deck alone without letting one of the others know that we were going up and having the, keep an eye on you.
It’s been hotter than the Gobi desert and none of us has slept more than 5 hours in the last 60. We are rolling 20-30 degrees from side to side in this swell. Joerg is starting to get irritable. The water is the deepest blue colour you have ever seen. It constantly invites me to swim but Stefano is quick to warn about sharks and he appears to know a lot about them. He launches into telling me about pelagic sharks versus reef sharks and how out here there are mostly likely only great whites, bull sharks or tiger sharks. These are all the nasty ones that bite with bulls beings the worst according to Stefano because they have bad eyesight and are not discerning so they will bite anything and ask questions later. He says that if you swim off the back of the boat you would just be like a bit of shark bait and a bite would likely be fatal. Needless to say after this shark education it puts me off any swim so we sit in the cockpit in 32 degrees of heat, sweating like water fountains. Stefano then tells a story about a bull shark that found its way into a lake on a Florida golf course after a tidal surge and lived there for 10 years, only in Florida I think.
The huge primary electric winches on port and starboard have stopped working. Joerg is trying to problem shoot the issue and he starts speaking to himself in German and I’m pretty sure there is swearing in there somewhere. His hair is all sticking up at the back and he looks like a mad professor or someone who has been too long at sea. I jump in to help although I know nothing about electrical systems I look up Amel 55 and problems with winches. I google problems with electric winches in general and start to locate the fuses, the relay and the dual function control box. There are fuses for the winches in 3 separate places and all look good. Joerg studies the electrical diagrams for the boat but we have failed to find the relay for the starboard side winches. There is a lot more swearing in German. A message is sent out to Amel and the Amel owners group. We spend close to four hours trying to fix the winches but to no avail. Time to switch gears and the next task is to replace the prop on the port side Watt and Sea. The Watt and Sea is a hydrogensrator that is fastened to the transom of the boat that generates power for the boat. That along with an impressive bank of solar panels and a wind turbine supplies all of the energy needs for the boat. The replacement of the prop is really straightforward and this is another task that I can now comfortably do. For now we are ignoring the fact that we haven’t managed to fix the winches and will come back to it later. Perhaps when it not 32 degrees out . Joerg mulls things over and comes back at them from a different angle. Impressively, he seems able to fix pretty well anything and I enjoy learning from this. I do a deck walk to regularly check all of the lines, fittings and sails for wear and tear and chaffing. Given all of the forces on all of these components there is surprisingly only a couple of areas of real wear. There is soft shackle around a carbon eye in danger of breaking and I whip a carbon eye into a dyneema loop in the hopes that it lasts longer than some of the other shackles that we have.
It had been non stop for a few days, completely relentless changing sails and sail configurations but in the last few hours the wind has dropped and the boat is slowing down. This infuriates Joerg. We had 24 hours with little wind and flapping sails in 30 degree heat, you could go really go cracker barell waiting for the flapping to stop and the wind to come back. I was covered in so much sea salt and sweat my phone didn’t recognize my face anymore.
One of the food lockers smells like cat food and I am rapidly going off food as much of it is also going off in this heat. Stefano discovers that a box of a dozen eggs is completely worm infested despite the fact that each one was washed in bleach before being put on the boat. Every piece of fruit and veg was washed in bleach, all food was removed from
any cardboard packaging and paper labels were removed from tins. All of this to prevent insects and cockroach eggs being brought on board. We have now run out of all fresh food so will be digging into the cat food locker to find something to form into a meal until we reach land, it’s incredibly unappealing.
During the day, the water is the colour of deepest teal and as the sun sets it starts to turn a darker blue until night when it is inky black and shiny like someone painted a mirror on top and then sprinkled silver glitter all through its depths. There is no moon visible tonight so it’s pitch black as we hurtle through the darkness towards Hiva Oa. There are only 340 miles to go as I write this and I have to say I feel mixed about this amazing journey ending.
That’s all from me for now, I hope all is well in all of your worlds.
