Day 11 - April 17, Sunday
Last night we passed through 3 squalls, but rain only, no wind. The very, very, heavy rain lasted maybe 10 to 15 minutes. I was excited to see that the squalls actually do show up really well on the radar, big purple blobs, or yellow, depending on which page of the display is active. It will be interesting to see how big they really get as we get further into the Zone. There hasn’t been enough time to really test the range of the radar, in terms of seeing squalls. So far the farthest away squall that has shown up has been about 10 miles.
It has been interesting to watch the barometer today and yesterday. The GRIB files show the predicted pressure gradients, and our barometer shows the actual gradients as we move through the zones displayed in the GRIBs. We measured a low of 1008 yesterday, just about where the GRIB showed a small 1008 area. Now we are at 1012. We never lost all wind, even in the lowest pressure zones. It was blowing maybe 7 or 8 knots in the 1008 zone, and is blowing about 8 or 9 now in this 1012 zone. So far the GRIBs have, on the average, been generally but not specifically accurate, which is exactly what you would expect for computer generated broad scale predictions. We are at about 7.40 N by 124 W as I write this morning, and are getting ready to gybe to a more directly south course. The winds have been mostly from the NNE, rather than northeasterly or easterly. This has caused us to feel more comfortable on a starboard tack, heading more to the west than to the south west.
We’re fishing again, or rather I am. I’m not sure that Emil wants to take the chance that he will have to kill, bleed, gut, clean and fillet out another fish. We still have plenty of food from our provisioning in Mexico, but are out of unfrozen fresh meat, chicken or fish. Chicken fajitas tonight if we don’t catch today. The softer foods, like tomatoes, avocados, bananas, cauliflower, and even oranges, threatened to or did spoil the quickest, so we ate them as quickly as we could. The fresh tortillas seem to be holding up pretty well, no mold yet, and are a big hit. We have many pounds of exotic cheese - parmesan, jarlsburg, blue, feta, munster, some sort of excellent semi-hard dark yellowish one, and others that we haven’t dug out yet. The fresh roasted Nayarit coffee beans that we bought from the coffee roaster guy with the Huitchal art gallery and restaurant in La Cruz across the street from the British Pub is really good, too, at least as compared to most Mexican coffee. Nice dark roast, very delicious. I still prefer Victor’s French Roast, from Redmond, Washington.
There is a thick cloud layer today. The low clouds are solidly gray, but not angry gray, except under the squalls themselves where they are a seriously dark color. You can see several squalls at a time, off against the horizon, rain sweeping along underneath of them. We’ve had lightening, thunder, heavy rain, no sun, very interesting weather, but no meaningful wind in most of the rain bursts and no lightening within 10 miles or so of the boat. The rain is washing the crusted layers of salt off the boat. The three of us are huddled in the cockpit, soaked to the bone but still warm, enjoying the rain but wishing for sun. The biggest squalls on the radar were maybe 12 miles long and three or four miles wide, visible for up to maybe 10 miles away. There is no chance of missing them on the radar screen, they are very distinctive. You can easily track their direction and speed and calculate your chances of being hit or missed. In one squall we had 20 knots of wind for twenty minutes, but most of them generated no real wind, just lots of heavy rain. In the heavy wind one we were in a white out, between the huge amounts of rain, the low clouds, the wind whipped seas and just a general gray brightness all around us. It was disorienting to the unnamed helmsman (because of my past training I actually typed ‘helmsperson’, but refuse to use that term in polite society or in a complete sentence) and while tacking the boat he/we/she/i/they did a 360 degree turn. I might have accidently said something that confused the helmsman and thus contributed to the confusion that resulted in us doing a 360 during the white out…….
We got through the squall zone in under 60 miles, one degree of latitude. It was a very small ITCZ. It was at about 9 degrees N latitude to 8 N or so, there weren’t any bright yellow lines on the ocean like what they have invented for the first down line on football TV.
Data entry for day 11, ending the April 17 to April 18, 1pm to 1pm, 24 hour period:
24 hour Mileage towards waypoint: (155 - 42) = 113
Wind Speed: 1 knots (True)
Boat Speed at time of log entry: 5.8 knots
Sail Plan: 100% main, 80% unfurled of the 140% genoa
Wave Height/State: 0 foot wind waves, 2 foot swell long period
Course: 199 magnetic, 221 GPS
Barometer: 1014
Temp: 82 degrees F.
Humidity: 88%
My Handheld GPS distance to waypoint/Hiva Oa: 42.02 and 1229
Location: 05.50.592, 125.23.126
Day 12 - April 18, Monday
Since getting through the ITCZ at 9 degrees N down to 8 N, we’ve mostly been motoring (at maybe 70% of normal cruising speed which is where Emil says we get the best fuel economy per mile covered) almost due south at about 5 knots with the goal of hitting the equator at 127 to 128 degrees W longitude. For about an hour yesterday we had SE winds at about 14 knots, so we sailed. Our mantra for this bit of ocean is ‘sail when you can, motor when you have to’. ‘Have to’ seems to occur at around 3.5 to just under 4 knots of boat speed. We want to get through the doldrums, below the equator, and into the SE trades. Oh, yeah. And to become shellbacks! Dominique had never heard the term before and is now really scratching his brain trying to think of the French term for shellback. Given France’s long maritime history, he is confident they will have a comparable term. I’m not so sure. The French might have used our term 'shellback', like they did for French fry, hot dog, hamburger, and entrepreneur. It was, though, a bit impolite for W to complain publicly that the French don’t have their own word for entrepreneur, don’t you think?
We are talking yesterday evening, in the cockpit, while enjoying the warm tropical breezes and admiring the sunset, over glasses of wine and hor d’hourves, about our miles covered and the experience of travelling a long ways over the ocean. It is sort of like driving across a continent in that you go through different climate zones and geographies. As you sail down the degrees of latitude and longitude (now that is a pleasing and exciting concept, eh?) the temperature of the ocean and air changes, the type of clouds changes, the sea state and the direction of the waves and swells changes, the birds change, what you see on the horizon changes, the ocean color changes, the general vibe of the area changes. It is only “just a lot of water” in the same sense that North America is “just a lot of dirt”.
I’m on the dark to dawn watch as I type this in the cockpit, in my shorts and T-shirt. The sky is just beginning to lighten. Hopefully it will just be a beautiful orange sunrise, lighting up the temple of the heavens, and won’t be a red sunrise, as we sailors don’t want to have to “take warning” as the old saying goes. I see the perhaps full moon hasn’t quite set over my left shoulder, as the dawn rises forward of my right shoulder. I just stopped typing for a minute to don my “mighty predator” robes and put my fishing dragline back into the water. My fishing buddy Geoff told me to leave it in all night, but who wants to catch and dispatch a fish while you are sleeping and/or it is dark out?
We’ll see what the day brings. We are well down into the 6 degree N area, running towards 5. Remember, 60 miles per latitude degree (same for longitude degrees this close to the equator), so we have at least 360 miles to the equator. Hopefully those will mostly be sailing miles. We’re counting on picking up the SE trades well north of the equator, but what happens depends on the gods. Especially Freyja. Hopefully she isn’t too pissed at me for leaving her back at the dock…….
Hmmm. I’m getting hungry and the wine I opened a couple of hours ago is almost done getting ready for me to drink. 36 minutes until my dawn watch is over….. (Reporting back hours later, after napping I made fried eggs, toast and bacon instead of our more normal fruit and granola and soy milk breakfast. Dominique, our Frenchman aboard, says that in France it is unheard of to have omelets for breakfast, that they are an afternoon or evening meal. We bought a couple of cases of soy milk at Costco, and it is a huge hit – it stores well in the bilge, tastes great, and is just really nice to have onboard.
As a note, on the sail plan statistic, the %s for the genoa are the amount unfurled. It is a 140% genoa, not a 150% as I’ve said before. We are motor sailing along at 6 knots, with 7 knots of wind. It is very much like Puget Sound, some wind but not enough to really move the boat, flat seas, smallish waves, motor on and sails up. I just noticed that my little personal GPS, a Garmin map76, has an altitude function and that is actually measuring and reporting the difference between the bottom of the swells and the top of them. As the boat sinks to the bottom of a set of swells, it’s showing – 5.6 or so, and at the top of the biggest sets it is showing around +4.0 or so. I’ll have to think about whether or not it is an accurate measure of the height of the swells. They certainly don’t look like 9 feet. The ocean surface is a fractal plain, with waves inside of waves inside of waves, even on the calmest day.
We hit some more squalls yesterday evening. All day we had been sailing through the most majestic clouds, reaching for who knows how many thousands (maybe tens of thousands, they were really tall) of feet into the clear blue sky. Some were big anvil shaped thunder heads and others looked like nuclear mushroom clouds. You could tell that immense, maybe even astounding, amounts of energy were contained in and being released from the 93 degree F ocean water (my actual measurement with digital thermometer) and the tropical sun heated air. The amounts of solar and heat energy at play here near the equator are simply massive compared to up north.
Data entry for day 12, ending the April 18 to April 19, 1pm to 1pm, 24 hour period:
24 hour Mileage towards waypoint: (1229 - 1098) = 131
Wind Speed: 5 knots (True)
Boat Speed at time of log entry: 5.5 knots
Wave Height/State: half foot wind waves, 10’ swell long from NE
Course: 185 magnetic, 223 GPS bearing to Hiva Oa
Barometer: 1017
Temp: 79 degrees F.
Humidity: 63%
My Handheld GPS distance to Hiva Oa: 1098
Location: 3.40.569, 126.15.164
Day 13 - April 19, Tuesday
It was a pleasant day sailing today. Though I should say motoring, as that is really what we were doing. The sails were up trying to extract some help from the 6 knots of wind that we had most of the day, but it was really all about the engine. The sea was pretty calm so it was easy riding. There were lots of big energetic cumulus clouds with beautiful celestial cloud displays, and a gorgeous sunset. The crew sat in the cockpit for hours just mesmerized by the clouds, or maybe meditating with the clouds as the focus. We had that easy peaceful feeling all day, despite the racket of the engine.
Emil fished and caught nothing, I didn’t bother. This area doesn’t seem very fishy somehow, though there are big schools of little 4 to 6 inch flying fish. I’ll have to ask my ocean fishing buddies if there are catchable fish in the doldrums, or how the population of catchable good eating fish spreads out between Mexico and the Marquesas. No flying fish or squid on deck this morning, either. I think more of them land on the boat when the weather is rougher.
We noticed that the satphone wasn’t always charging when you put it in the cradle. You have to sort of rock and rotate it to get the contacts to line up. We’ll clean the terminals on the phone and charging station and see if that helps. The battery seems to indicate full charge and then be half discharged an hour later. If we have to get in the life raft it would be nice to have it fully charged.
Data entry for day 13, ending the April 19 to April 20, 1pm to 1pm, 24 hour period:
24 hour Mileage towards waypoint: (1098 - 980) = 118
Wind Speed: 12 knots (True)
Boat Speed at time of log entry: 6.0 knots
Wave Height/State: 1’ to 2’ wind waves, 5 foot SE swell long period
Course: 2 magnetic, 226 GPS
Barometer: 1014
Temp: 82 degrees F. (sensor on arch)
Humidity: 93% (sensor on arch)
My Handheld GPS distance to Hiva Oa: 980
Location: 1.35.016, 126.56.685
Day 14 - April 20, Wednesday
We started sailing again last night at about 2 degrees 30 minutes N or so, and what a relief to turn off the motor. The wind filled in from the NE last night around midnight, then during the night it changed to the E, and now very early this morning from the SE.
It is very tempting to turn towards the Marquises at this point, but we are holding a course to take us across the equator at about 127.5 W. My thinking is that if we cross further west there is a risk of having to sail close hauled all the way to Hiva Oa if the SE trades decide to come more from the S, as they sometimes do. The further to the west you are the steeper the angle at which you have to drop down to Hiva Oa and the more critical the changeable angle of the SE trades. I’d rather keep the weather gauge firmly in hand so that we can have a comfortable sailing angle. The odds are the trades will stay from the SE, but keeping our southerly course now is conservative and a small price to pay for insurance against the risk of 900 miles of close hauled sailing. While it does add a few more miles to the trip, other than the worry about the rudder falling off life is pretty nice out here in the ocean. And the rudder has been quieter as we haven’t had the type of seas that toss the stern around.
The countdown to the equator is exciting - now that we are under two degrees the tension is palpable! I do hope that they have installed one of those bright yellow lines at the equator, like they have for the first down line in TV football. We’re trying to guess when we’ll cross it, and right now it looks like the wee hours of the night. Since nobody seems interested in organizing a ceremony we may each just have a tot or two of rum as we sail across and are instantly turned into shellbacks. I don’t feel like wasting my shaving cream to make a crown on my head.
Looking at my GPS and seeing that Hiva Oa is less than a thousand miles away is also pretty exciting. We are getting to the point in the trip where you discuss the possible number of days left and the odds of arriving on the weekend. The officials are off work at 5 on Friday and technically you have to stay on your boat under the Q flag until Monday morning.
We had a SE breeze this morning and thought we had made it to the SE trades. Yippee. Tonight, however, we are back to a NE breeze of maybe 7 knots so we’re still just plugging along at 4 to 5, but under sail instead of motor. We are at 1 degree 2 minutes……
Tonight Emil and I saw a freakin’ DOUBLE GREEN FLASH!!!!! While Dominique was below cooking we were sitting on the starboard side watching the sunset. The horizon was lined with towering energetic equatorial cumulus clouds, but the air was very clear and we were imagining that we could see through a little hole in the clouds clear to the horizon where the sun was going to sink into the water. Well, sure enough, bam! A very clear perfect bright unequivocal green flash just lit up and, well, flashed for what seemed like a second or two. Then it disappeared and a couple of heartbeats later, wham! another perfect bright very distinct green flash did its green flash thing for another second or two. Some might argue that this was really just one green flash interrupted by a distant rippling of the ocean’s surface, or that Shanti was lifted by a swell, and maybe it was, BUT we, Emil and I, saw two clear distinct and separate green flashes in one sunset, so we are going to make the double green flash YouTube video and show the ol’ Double Rainbow dude a thing or two. (If you haven’t already, look up “Double Rainbow” on YouTube.) I’m not sure what the statistical odds are of seeing a double GF, as seeing a single one is hard enough. Shanti was so close to the 1 degree north line as to not matter, maybe one tenth of a minute or so off, maybe right on, we didn’t check our position for maybe five minutes. I’m saying it was right on the one degree line. Our longitude was 127 degrees and 13 minutes or so. And, just for the record, we kept yelling at Dominique to come up and watch the sunset, but he replied that he could see the sunset through the galley porthole, which he could. However, because of the maybe 6 feet of difference in elevation between his eye level and ours, he completely missed both green flashes. I think he thought we were putting him on about us seeing it.
Data entry for day 14, ending the April 20 to April 21, 1pm to 1pm, 24 hour period:
24 hour Mileage towards waypoint: (980 - 874) = 106
Wind Speed: 12 knots (True)
Boat Speed at time of log entry: 5 knots
Wave Height/State: 2 foot wind waves, 2 foot swell
Course: 217 magnetic, 228 GPS
Barometer: 1013
Temp: 83 degrees F.
Humidity: 89%
My Handheld GPS distance to Hiva Oa: 874
Location: 00.06.287, 127.46.227
Day 15 - April 21, Thursday
Well, we crossed the equator this morning about 9:00 o’clock our boat time, which is Seattle (Pacific) time. It was pretty exciting in a salty dog ancient mariner lure of the south seas romantic sort of way, and in terms of marking the completion of a part of our journey to the Marquesas. We crossed at 127° 40’ with about 12 knots of NE wind and wind waves on our port (NE) quarter. Once across the equator we turned the boat to head more or less directly to Hiva Oa. Our ‘miles to go’ reads about 885.
Dominique made some delicious French crepes for breakfast. We coated them with various combinations of sugar, lime juice, jam and honey, and washed them down with fresh brewed dark roasted coffee from the La Cruz roaster. All in all, it was a memorable “crossing the equator feast”. We toasted both with Dominique's Genepi, a French liquor made with 40 sticks of a mountainous flowering plant of the same name, 40 cubes of sugar and 40 days of brewing, and my tequila. First Neptune got his portion of each, then the boat, then the captain, and finally the patiently waiting crew. No shaving cream crowns or funny sea-weedy costumes were in evidence, just humble appreciation of our personal accomplishment.
This morning we have a nice mild day with a NE wind of 12 knots, clear skies, easy small seas and a reasonable temperature. We are quite comfortable, except for the stress of the rudder snapping and creaking around in its upper bushing area. We hadn’t heard much from it for the last several days, but the combination of these seas, our current direction, whatever, is making it complain again. By 2 pm the following seas were tossing the stern around more and the sounds coming from the rudder indicated an increased level of violence being done to it. I’m anxious for the E or SE trades to get established, so as to change the wave pattern and our angle of sail to those waves, all in the hope of easing the strain on the rudder. Given the right seas and heading the rudder seems to quiet down and be quite happy. If the stern isn’t getting pushed back and forth the rudder is happy. Ditto for the crew, as we feel pretty stressed when the rudder is snapping and cracking….and we sort of forget about it when it quiets down.
Laundry at sea on Shanti is done either on the floor of the shower by stomping on it, or in a bucket in the shower by squeezing it, both with fresh water given our abundance. I prefer the later method. I’ve heard that a toilet plunger used in the bucket is even better, but couldn’t find a fresh unused plunger to experiment with. The laundry dries nicely on the lifelines. Our water maker is a Schenker brand, an Italian make, I think. I’m reading Emil's copy of Moitessier’s book “The Long Way”. He mentions that if clothing or bedding is salted up, if you can sort of get it dried, or just even to the damp stage, and then hang it on the shrouds or lifelines the salt will shake out of it. The salt doesn’t so much grip the cloth as simply get trapped in it, so it is willing to come out with some shaking. The more salt you get out, the drier it gets and thus even more salt will come out.
Emil had his fishing pole going today. After a few hours we saw it twitch a couple of times and then nothing. I grabbed it and started reeling it in, to speed up the lure and make it look like it was desperately escaping. As it got closer to the boat we saw a big brown back chasing it, with his dorsal fin out of the water. A big mahi mahi, perhaps. I jerked the bait a couple of times and it took it with a mighty lung. Then, and remember we were sailing along at 5 knots or so, it started taking line out. It took more and more line until we were getting down to the bottom of the reel. The weight of line on the reel wasn’t enough to hold the fish and the main line finally snapped somewhere above the swivel. The handline is so much better when you’re under way and meat fishing. Once the fish is on, you just pull him in, maybe after waiting for a couple of minutes for it to get tired out. No fuss, no muss, no need to slow the boat down, unless, of course, you have a monster on, but we haven’t had to deal with that yet, thankfully.
Data entry for day 15, ending the April 21 to April 22, 1pm to 1pm, 24 hour period:
24 hour Mileage towards waypoint: (874 - 764) = 110
Wind Speed: 9 knots (True)
Boat Speed at time of log entry: 3.8 knots
Wave Height/State: 2 foot wind waves, 5 foot swell
Sail Plan: 100% main, 80% unfurled genoa
Course: 220 magnetic, 230 GPS
Barometer: 1014
Temp: 85 degrees F.
Humidity: 84%
My Handheld GPS distance to waypoint/Hiva Oa: 764
Location: 01.37.019, 128.54.199
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