Author: paulcollister

Day 27, Mon 16th July. 49-46N, 155-12W. Daily Run: 110 NM. Weather: 0-6 Knots N, Calm and dry. 1252 NM to go
We are not becalmed, but if the wind drops anymore we will be, right now the wind has dropped to about 3-6 knots, and we are drifting along making about 4-5 knots, which is not bad considering how still it feels. Right now the sea is very calm, and predicted to get calmer. A calm sea helps a lot as the sails stay filled and power us along nicely. I have taken the reef out of the mainsail, so for the first time on this passage we have the whole sail out. Normally at this point I would fire up the engine to push us along a little, but fuel supplies mean that’s not an option. Later on today I will put 20 litres of my reserve 40 Litres into the main tank, mostly to use as heating fuel.
My idea to fix the wind vane chain with fishing line was modified when I realised that monel wire would do a better job, and I have plenty of that. Monel is a metal, I’m not sure which one, or what compound, but it doesn’t corrode or react with other metals much. I mostly use it for tying off shackle pins so they won’t vibrate loose, particularly on the anchor chain attachments. The repair worked a treat and we have been back on the wind vane for 24 hours and it’s coping very well, despite the lack of wind.
The iPad is acting like it’s possessed now, using it is a race against the invisible finger that keeps pressing buttons before you. Receiving an email requires me to do a screen capture of it immediately, before the phantom finger sends it off somewhere like the deleted folder. We have a backup system for emails, but that is on the android phone that caught fire. A third backup on the old iPad is an option, but that has about 1/3rd of the screen not accepting input, so you have to constantly keep rotating it to get the letters you need to work on the keyboard displayed on the working segment of the screen. It’s too old to have airdrop, so we can’t compose them on the mac and send them over as we did before. For some reason I didn’t put the iridium software on my iPhone, which is a shame. Kathy isn’t very impressed with the rate of failure on the handheld devices. I tried to explain it’s a harsh environment out here, but that didn’t wash.
I had another chat on the Ham Radio last night to Albert, a VE7 guy in Vancouver, he seemed to be copying our signal without problem, I told him we were sailing to Canada, close to Vancouver from Japan. He said “Wow, thats a long way, that must be taking a week to do” If only! The nice thing was he told us it’s really hot 30 deg C in Vancouver. He then tried to tell me about dealing with such heat, and the problems, I didn’t mention I have just had a couple of years in Malaysia, and 30 deg is no big deal.
The block on the Dutchman I use to tension it broke, or at least the clam cleats that are part of it. I have affected a repair that works, but I don’t have spare clam cleats of the right size. Nothing else is broken so all in all the boats in great shape. A few ships passed us by, all cargo ships plying there way between USA/Mexico and China/Hong Kong.
We are now about 3/4 of the way to our destination, we were getting estimates of 7-9 days before the wind dropped, more like 12 days now, but I’m hoping the wind will pick up a little as we head north of the high, and as the high moves south. We might even get some sunshine in a day or two. I have predicted that next weekend will be our last at sea for a while.
Paul Collister

Day 25, Sun 15th July. 49-15N, 157-49W. Daily Run: 137 NM. Weather: 10-20 Knots W, Cold to go
A bit of a blow in the night, but mostly lightish winds, 8-12 knots from astern. I spent a fair bit of the last 24 hours keeping the mainsail happy, with gybing back and forth as the wind wobbled around. Looking at the charts, it’s hopefully straightforward now, we just follow the high pressure system around to the mainland. At the moment, it looks like the ‘high’ is staying quite far north, so we need to go further north to benefit from it and not get stalled near it’s centre. This means we approach Seattle from the North and as such I think we willl make landfall in Canada. Right now I’m looking at Bull Harbour as our first stop, an Indian Reserve that is well sheltered and has a dock and moorings available.
The main event for me was doing a gybe this morning, I hadn’t payed enough attention to the genoa, which wasn’t furled properly from some point in the night. It’s impossible to see the genoa from the cockpit when the main is up, and impossible at night as it’s so dark, but the end result was that as I went to let the genoa out some after the gybe, it wrapped around itself tying a knot in itself around the foresatay. Much as a spinnaker does all the time. This is a terrible situation, as it means the sail is sort of out, and flapping a lot, but not doing any good. eventually you have to take a knife to the sail if you can’t unwrap it. Pulling on the furling line or the sheets tends to make the situation worse, the best way I believe to fix this is to reverse the sequence of events that caused it, so you need to take the sail back through the wind, and hope for a gust to undo the knot. All the time the wind is flapping the sail and tightening the knot. Annoyingly for me, I had to undo the preventer and dutchman I had just set up after the gybe to get the main back safely to midships, get the autohelm running, start the engine and take the boat through a series of turns into the wind to try and coax the sail out. I was about to give up, as everything I was trying seemed not to work, when suddenly the sail started to unravel, then with a whack, it was out and full of wind. So then back to the planed course, sails trimmed, auto helm on, preventer back on, dutchman re-tensioned and away we go. The whole procedure took nearly an hour, however it only felt like 15 minutes to me.
I’m back on the electric autohelm now as the chain I repaired on the Monitor self steering vane packed in last night, We went wildly off course and almost gybed, however the main auto helm was able to take over, despite using loads of power. So thats a job for today, I have a cunning plan, that involves making a chain link out of fishing line.
While on deck this morning I found the other half of the shackle I found yesterday. So that’s nice, when whatever it was holding together flies apart I will have a shackle to put back in it.
Kathy is now 5 games in the lead on scrabble, but I intend to put a stop to her runaway success today!
The boat has been rolling badly for a few days now, so Kathy has postponed the bread making. I’m counting the chocolate bars alongside the days left, I’m not panicking yet, I presume they have chocolate in Canada.
Paul Collister.

Day 25, Sat 14th July. 48-34N, 161-06W. Daily Run: 155 NM. Weather: 15 Knots W, Cold but Sunny. 1494 NM to go
A great sail over the last 24 hours, the winds picked up to 25 knots and we were flying, of course the waves followed suit and now the wind has dropped back to 15 knots, the waves are still up there. We managed a good daily run of 155 miles, using just the main with one reef and the staysail for most of the run.
The iPad is playing up now, the screen repair I had done in Osaka seems to have failed as the device is generating random screen touches when you hold it. It’s ok if you keep it flat on a surface, but that’s a pain itself a with all the rolling, it keeps changing orientation like that. Sadly a sequence of keystrokes it generated went along the lines of select inbox, delete all, select trash, delete all. Un f** ing believable. I watched it delete all our emails in a split second. To be fair to the shop, they did say that the frame was distorted when I dropped it and they couldn’t guarantee the repair. I’m not buying a new one, not unless Apple are going to take care of my pension plan, seeing as they are taking all my pension funds in keeping their devices going. I gather the iPhone 7 onwards is waterproof, but probably not drop proof. I managed to read the latest emails, and I compose the blog on my MacBook and then airdrop it to the iPad for transmission, so lets hope that works, otherwise blog posts might get thin on the ground.
In other new, my morning inspection of the boat revealed a shackle pin sitting on the side deck. This means there is a shackle that has parted somewhere on the boat, but I can’t find it. I expect it will let me know where it is at some point 🙁
The wind vane has been steering us now for several days, it’s doing a good job, and worked well during the very strong winds last night.
For the radio hams out there, I heard a W2/7 New York old timer in California calling for DX (long distance or rare contacts) last night on 20m, I gave him a shout and had a nice chat, lots of QSB on my signal but he was strong. I think I have problems with my rig here though as he complained of awful audio and I can see the lights on the display dim terribly when I talk, so I think the supply wiring needs attention. Still it was good to know the SSB works at some level. I heard quite a lot of west coast hams in the afternoon.
We are making a steady 7 knots now, and the TTG (Time to go) display is moving between 7 and 9 days for ETA, which is nice.
This morning sw the end of Kathy’s bread, it made wonderful toast, and now we need the sea to calm down so she can bake some more. It’s one of the things we are really looking forward to in the USA and Canada, some real, sugar free, decent heavy brown/wholemeal bread. something that is hard to get in Asia.
The only job I have on today is to put some anti chafe on the starboard shrouds then do a gybe to starboard, I got some onto the port shrouds yesterday and it seems to work well. however my temporary patches seem to be wearing thin now. I remember reading that if you plan to sail your boat back to the UK/Europe from the Caribbean after doing the milk run, as they call it, you should allow about £1000 for wear and tear. This journey is twice that distance, so I presume I should expect to pay a fair bit. So far I think a few hundred pounds in a sail loft should sort out the batten pockets, and a few hundred pounds more for all the sheets and other lines that have chafed. A new iPad could come under wear and tear I suppose?
The recent days have blurred into each other now, today follows the same pattern, with bigger winds expected tonight. However we can see we are on the home strait now, I’m hoping it’s fairly straightforward for the next 1500 miles.
Paul Collister

Day 24, Fri 13th July. 48-12N, 164-50W. Daily Run: 130 NM. Weather: 10 Knots W, Cold & Grey. 1644 NM to go
The wind subsided a bit overnight, now it’s more gentle at around 10 knots, we have changed course to head east as that looks best from a long and short term perspective. Taking the rhumb line (direct route on the chart, but further than the great circle route), will get us better winds I hope.
Other than that, not a lot has happened, all systems trundling along just fine, with the exception of the block/car for the port Genoa sheet, which I found in bits this morning when I had a look around. I think it has rattled itself apart, with one of the pins heading over the side. I have cobbled together a repair which should be good. I’m learning a lot about equipping a boat for long offshore passages, despite the fact I probably won’t ever do one this long again. We We are getting low on diesel now, the heater uses a fair bit, we have 50 litres (ish) in the tank, and 40 on deck. So we are rationing the heating, and not running the engine unless essential. In retrospect I would have liked to have loaded another 60 litres on board in Japan, but it’s too late for that now. I intend to fit a fuel flow rate meter at some point so I can monitor usage better and work out the optimum revs for speed/consumption. We should be fine, just less lounging around in the cabin in t-shirts and shorts 😉
We adjusted the clocks again today, having travelled another 15 degrees East. We are now on Honolulu time, which is 10 hours before GMT/UTC. Our daily run would have been 136 NM before that change, which isn’t too bad.
If you have read Kathy’s blog entry yesterday, you will see she has modestly pointed out her slim victory in scrabble.
Paul Collister

Week Three (plus one day)
A series of notable events occurred during the course of this week. One of these is that this is the longest period either of us has been at sea at any one time. Our Atlantic crossing way back in 2006 took us three weeks. We’re on our 23rd day of this passage now, which leads me neatly on to one of the other events: the international dateline. On the afternoon of Sunday 8th July we crossed this ‘time border’ created by man long ago, and it’s confused me ever since. One minute it was 2pm on Sunday, and the next it was 4pm on Saturday 7th July, so we’d effectively sailed into yesterday. Suddenly all the time differences I’d committed to memory were altered; since we’re now in the Western hemisphere we’re 12 hours behind the UK, on the delightfully-named Pago Pago time zone (New Caledonia). As someone keen to get to Seattle as quickly as possible, this was a bit demoralising to say the least. I had to write Sunday 8th July twice in my journal and wait a whole day before I could cross Sunday off the calendar! I’m trying to consign this confusion neatly into the past now and concentrate on the future time changes (there are four more hours to add on before we reach Seattle). It’s a hard life out here on the Pacific 😉
Anyway, this week has also seen us pass the halfway mark and at the time of writing we’re almost two thirds of the way across. After a couple of days of slow progress with little wind and arduous side-to-side rocking, we’re making up for the lost miles by racing along at speeds of 8 – 10 knots; quite exhilarating if a little hard on mobility. The weather is best described as being grey, or grey and white, or light grey and dark grey. The few times I’ve poked my head up out of the cabin hatch, meerkat-style, I’ve been confronted with the image of a high, grey wall of water, white or grey skies and sometimes a sheet of thin drizzly rain. It’s been cold too; cold enough to have the heating on most of the time and to clad up in thermals under a duvet and blankets (well that’s mainly me but I’m always cold outside of the Tropics). This has meant that unlike the Atlantic crossing, I haven’t been up in the cockpit enjoying the sunrises and sunsets, or the phases of the moon, and watching for sea life on a flat calm sea. We did see a shark go gliding past last Friday on the last calm day before the cold and the high waves arrived – a slow-moving black and grey fin slicing the surface just a few feet away from us.
Paul reports daily on the progress of our journey and its details. I spend a good deal of time reading or listening to books on Audible so there really isn’t much for me to report on, especially as the cold is confining me to barracks. People have asked about food and meals so I thought I’d write a bit on that subject – without pictures. I don’t want to turn it into an extended ‘this is what we had for dinner’ social media post 🙂
So far there has been only one evening when it was too bouncy for me to make any dinner. I’d made a couple of attempts to get into the galley but felt too nervous to tackle hot pans after struggling to stay upright. Paul stepped in and managed to cook omelettes while the side-on waves did their utmost to throw things and people onto the floor. We still have a plethora of food on board, although we had our last fresh mixed salad a few days ago. I could have bought more tomatoes in fact because they kept surprisingly well, as did the iceberg and romaine lettuce and peppers. All fresh produce was stored in the fridge which is fairly spacious fortunately. We still have potatoes, carrots, onions, apples and oranges which have all kept well. I was a lot more regimented regarding meals and provisioning for the Atlantic. My instructions then were to allow for 3 or 4 weeks and to consider that the fridge and cooker might break down. We were also recommended to make meal plans for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Experience revealed that we really didn’t need three meals because we weren’t doing enough to justify that amount of food. This time, I merely wrote down a few ideas for easy to prepare evening meals and stocked up with pasta, ready made sauces, rice and noodles – as well as tins of tuna, baked beans, tomatoes, soups, peas, eggs, and ready-made curries to name but a few of the staples. We have a camping stove in case the cooker breaks and if the fridge breaks…well placing things safely outside will probably do the job of keeping things fresh: it’s that cold out there!
The bread in Japan, though marginally better than the loaves in Malaysia, wasn’t up to much taste-wise but it did keep for a long period, and when you just want some toast or a sandwich, it served its purpose. We bought (and still have) lots of chilled longlife naan breads and pitta breads, along with some pizza bases which are great heated up with some pizza topping and mixed herbs for lunch. Those are all fine but don’t cut it when you fancy some toast and Marmite. Once you start thinking of freshly-cooked bread, nothing else will do so I finally made some yesterday using the tried and trusted Jamie Oliver recipe. I embarked on it with one trepidation considering the rocky conditions. Apart from one spillage at the crucial runny stage, I managed to produce dough for two loaves, but as we’re still cautious about using too much gas with two weeks to go, I couldn’t let the oven heat up too much before baking. I’ve made better but they were pure luxury after so long making do with sugary doughy white slices.
We tend to keep to a 7 o’clock evening meal time and as Paul has pointed out, it becomes something to look forward to in the long days on board. I enjoy having the luxury of time to prepare and plan, and since I can’t contribute fully to the sailing tasks (it just doesn’t work for me), I’m happy having the galley as my domain on passage. I tend to let conditions dictate the type of meal we’ll have but even with my mostly vegan diet, I’m pleased with the variety of dishes we’ve had so far. Paul will mainly have what I have, with the odd addition of chicken breast (vacuum-packed), ham, tuna or meat-based sauces. Obviously he’ll be catching fish galore soon so that will be his meals sorted each night ;-). For the first week our dinners consisted of various salads with tuna, tofu, cheese, new potatoes; home made vegetable soup; stir fries and fresh ratatouille. All these we had with with baguettes which were crisped up in the oven and the last of the more wholesome bread.
During the second week I made a roasted vegetable tart using puff pastry, with new potatoes and baked beans; Spanish rice with tortilla wraps (Paul had tuna fillets with those), tofu and vegetable curry with leftover Spanish rice, soy burgers in tomato sauce with fried onions, peas, mushrooms and mashed potatoes; and homemade carrot and coriander soup. One night neither of us felt like eating due to the rough conditions, and another night we had pot noodles, which are tricky to prepare when it’s as if you’re wearing roller skates so, unsurprisingly, some of the contents ended up on the floor. I will often start preparing things in the afternoon, or when there’s a lull in the rocking. Doing things gradually is more manageable – not as daunting as trying to do everything within an hour. One afternoon I made some wholewheat pastry and used it for making vegan cornish-style pasties. These were handy for ‘grab’ snacks instead of sandwiches. It can be hard work getting stuff out of the fridge during extreme side-to-side rolling to create a sandwich. You need more than one pair of hands to stop spread, knives, cheese, jars etc from slipping and rolling around. Pasties, hard boiled eggs and slices of pizza bread are ideal to grab when you’re peckish and it’s rough (along with chocolate, cereal bars, biscuits, and crisps of course).
The boat has lots of storage space for things such as cans, bottles, packets and tins and they are duly stowed all over the place. To ensure we don’t forget what is where, I’ve made an inventory (written in a notebook, the old-fashioned way) which I try to remember to annotate whenever I move anything. Now that we are over halfway there, looking at what is still in the cupboards and lockers, I’m certain we won’t have to do a ‘big shop’ for the first couple of weeks after we arrive. My main concern at the moment is that I got my wine calculations wrong and it looks as if I will have to ration myself until we reach Seattle or Canada.
Apart from that, all is well as we hurtle towards our destination (it would have been nice to have found hot water bottles in Japan, though). I’m reading quite a few books about America at the moment, including the one Paul recently finished by Jonathan Raban which has some interesting passages about the area we’re going to. I’ll include some of them in next week’s blog. One last notable event – I’ve beaten Paul in the last four games of Scrabble :-).
Kathy

Day 22, Wednesday 11th July. 47-10N, 171-01W. Daily Run: 104 NM. Weather: 8 Knots WSW, Cold/Rain/Fog. 1901 NM to go
Yesterday continued the theme from Monday, rain, fog, light winds and generally miserable, like a typical summers day in Manchester 😉 A dismal run of just 104 NM, with speeds often around 3 knots. The wind picked up for a while, and we had a few good hours of progress, also the sun came out just long enough to get some much needed charge into the batteries. The charts from NOAA (The National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration, or something like that) showed a gale approaching with 35 knot winds, It looked on their charts like it was going to run us over, but so far there has been no sign of wind, I changed course a little to the south in the hope of missing it, but in the end have just ended up closer to the high pressure. If you are wondering why our course is wandering all over the show, it’s for 2 reasons, firstly at night we tend to let the wind vane steering follow the wind, rather than try to adjust the sails and course, unless its a major wind shift. Secondly, often the wind is coming from close to astern of us, and we will steer to keep it on one side for a few hours, then change it to the other side by gybing later. To gybe is a big deal when the headsail is held out by the spinnaker pole, as it often is in winds from astern. The sail has to go in first, then the pole has to come down, then go up again on the other side, then the sails can be moved across. Invariably after this has been done, the wind shifts meaning we need to go back to the old course. In the bigger picture, going off course won’t make that much of a difference to when we arrive, we still expect it to be during the last week in July.
Other news is light on the ground here, Kathy won her third game of scrabble in a row, she’s hoping to set a new record for 4 in a row, most unlikely. You don’t see them playing scrabble on the Volvo ocean race now, do you!
The main news is that I was checking the boat yesterday before sunset and I noticed a mark on the mainsail, closer inspection revealed damage to the sail. It had been chafing on the lower rear shrouds when fully out. This is bad news as the sail is pretty new and I had every intention of preventing this, but failed to put chafe protection on either the sail or shrouds. Originally I had planned to swap the mainsail for the old one, but that has a few problems, one being that the battens don’t fit anymore as they had to be trimmed for the new mainsail. Also it’s not really possible to get to the shrouds to put some anti-chafe material on them now, even if I had enough. So I dropped the sail to check further, and it’s mainly the batten pockets, which protrude slightly that have taken the wear, with the one I looked at having worn a hole the size of a penny in it. This could easily tear more in a strong blow, so I will have to repair it before the sail goes back up, but I also need to inspect the other 15 places (4 battens, 2 shrouds, 2 sides) where it might be chafing on the batten pockets. It might be better to get the old mainsail out and put that up. I’m not sure how that will look without battens, it might be fine as it’s mainly for downhill runs, but in a blow it might be useful if we can go to wind. Lots of things to think about before I do anything. Hopefully after I see todays forecasts I will be able to decide and get the job done before dusk. For now we are making about 4 knots towards the east in 7 knots of wind from behind. The only problem is when the waves kick us and we fall back the sail collapses, then comes back with a huge whack that shakes the boat. I have reduced the headsail area to a level where the shock seems reasonable. This does take its toll on the sail as well as the rigging, but hopefully not too much.
The waves are subsiding now, but for the last few days they have been coming from very different directions, we sometimes get waves arriving from the bow, beam and stern at near the same time.
The little NMEA/SignalK router I use to send data from the sensors (Wind,GPS and AIS) to the iDevices and MacBook keeps rebooting, sometimes every 30 seconds, I can’t see any reason why it should just have decided to do this now, but that’s a job for today to try and find the cause.
Finally I had a go at repairing the clocks, I figured it couldn’t be much, but the first one I looked at is now in the bin, valuable knowledge learnt about cheap clock mechanism’s and how not to take them apart. I paid nearly £1 for this tasteful plastic timepiece in a shop in Langkawi. Next, I was disappointed that the brass nautical ‘Quartz Crystal – Fanchet of Paris’ chronometer, which probably cost £50 or more, also had a very similar cheap plastic mechanism inside, just fancy gold looking hands. However with my new qualification as Master Watchmaker, I was able to find the bad connection, a little bit of copper that just needed a little bend, and away it ticked. So we now can see the time again without having to reach for a mobile phone.
Do tune in tomorrow to see if Kathy managed to get 4 wins in a row on Scrabble, hopefully by then we will have found out if England are in the world cup final or not.
Paul Collister

Day 21, Tuesday 10th July. 46-59N, 173-29W. Daily Run: 135 NM. Weather: 15 Knots SW, Cold/Rain/Fog. 2000 NM to go
Yesterday wasn’t up to much, very cold, damp and foggy for a lot of the time, the wind was light and the waves had a period and height, and were on the beam, in such a way that we rolled a lot, from cap rail in the water on one side to the same on the other. Thats something like a 30-40 degree swing each way. On top of that the winds dropped in the night and the wind vane was upset when a wave knocked the boat right off course causing us to crash gybe. This meant the boom tried to shoot across the boat and the genoa backed. Fortunately, the Dutchman boom restrainer and the preventer line stopped the boom from moving much and prevented any damage, and gave me time to kit up in my oilies and get on deck. The main was backed also and the wind vane couldn’t recover, I hand steered us back on course, reset everything and we were back to normal, rocking and rolling.
By 6AM the wind had backed considerably and increased in strength, and because we were on the wind vane steering, we had changed course automatically and were heading NW, which is the wrong way really. I went up again, and gybed the sails, adjusted the steering to put us ENE and retired to my bunk. The waves are now on the starboard quarter and giving us a more comfortable ride. At 8AM I checked the weather and found the low pressure system a little closer to us, with stronger winds on the way. I adjusted the course to allow for this, despite the forecasts always being wrong, and we are now heading more Easterly. Making around 7 knots, the little ETA window on the computer is saying 10-11 days, which is nice. The current forecasts for 14 days ahead have us arriving into Seattle from the north, if this turns out to be the case then we may well change our destination to Canada and pop in behind Vancouver island, which we would be passing anyway. There is a marina near the north of the island we plan to leave the boat in for the winter, so we can check in there for a few days, do a recky on the place, then head down the inside passage to Seattle.
I cooked us omelettes for dinner last night as it was too rolly for Kathy to do any serious cooking. On the equipment front, we have three wall clocks on board, they have all failed within the last few weeks, two of them on the same day. Is there a saying, “Don’t mess with time”, if not there should be. We had to run the engine yesterday for a few hours to get some juice into the batteries, and today we may have to do the same. I’m getting 100W out of our 700W solar array, that’s at midday, we have 100% cloud cover and some decent rain right now.
We have seen on the AIS a couple of ships within 50 miles or so, generally cargo ships passing from Mexico to Asia or Russia.
Paul Collister

Day 20, Monday 9th July. 45-42N, 176-02W. Daily Run: 97 NM. Weather: 10 Knots NW, damp & foggy. 2127 NM to go
The wind dropped yesterday, and we spent a lot of time rolling, the wind picked up in the evening from the North, nothing on the weather charts would suggest this, and so we sailed close hauled through the night, however about 4am I realised that the auto helm had given up again, I donned my oilies and went outside to investigate, as the wind wasn’t that great and the waves weren’t huge, I thought I might crack what the problem is. However it was so cold, my fingers gave up quick and I had to retreat to warm myself up and find some gloves. Such a contrast from just a couple of months ago when I dreamt of cool evenings. Back on deck I could see that the auto helm was trying to get us on a course of 25deg but was giving up and the boat was rounding up to being close hauled on its own. The wind by now had shifted to NW and we should be on a beam reach, I adjusted the sails appropriately and steered by hand, the boat seemed very light on the wheel, no sense of wether or lee helm, so back on with the autopilot, and again she tries to bring us north onto a close hauled tack. So I left that for now and hooked up the wind powered steering vane which also struggled to keep the course, but a bit more sail adjustment and all was well, we have been keeping our course of roughly NE now for 10 hours without a problem, however we have beam on waves now, so it’s very rolly. I lost a cup of coffee this morning, it headed for the passage bunk, just missing the phone. I hope they have laundromats in America 😉
We hear a lot of voices and animals calling on the boat, both Kathy and I often hear a male voice choir singing in the cockpit when we are below, various people shouting can also be heard through the night. I do hope a cruise liner didn’t sink here recently and they are real. Kathy also thinks that the birds wing I found in the cockpit this morning is a sign! Good thing I’m not suspicious. After all, 2000 miles from Japan, and the USA, in 4 mile deep water, in a little boat skirting around gales , “What could possibly go wrong” as I often say. However the last days run was dismal, 97NM, the chart plotter we use is OpenCPN and it has a little display showing the arrival date and time based on our current speed, which varies wildly, but mostly it’s showing the last week in July, lately it’s been showing August, which is hopefully not going to be the case.
Kathy has heard that people are posting comments to the blog, which is great, sadly we can’t read them, we could if I had thought ahead and configured our blog email differently. Still thanks for the comments and we look forward to reading them all while sitting in an internet cafe, eating fresh croissants, baguettes with something they call jelly over there, in just a few weeks time.
The fog and clouds have seriously reduced our charging ability, and with us running the heater all day I can see we should have packed another 50 litres of diesel, so we may have to start to compromise soon, we can save a lot of electricity by not using the auto helm and keeping the fridge on its lowest setting.
Kathy saw a stack of dolphins yesterday, while I slept.
Paul Collister

Day 19, Sunday 8th July. 44-42N, 177-48W. Daily Run: 122 NM. Weather: 5 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2220 NM to go
Another dull day at the office, actually, I’m so engrossed in the program I’m writing that I sometimes forget I’m on a boat in the middle of a big ocean. The weather improved a little yesterday afternoon and we got some sailing in, but the rolling was still a problem, by morning today we had good wind, and the rolling was slight, however the fog has rolled back in, heavy this time and the wind has dropped to less than 5 knots, and we are wallowing around. I have started the engine as the solar panels don’t generate very much in these conditions. I’m very conscious of how much fuel we are using on the engine and the heating, so I’m keeping the revs low, unfortunately this is not good for the engine. Yesterday was fun, we passed the International dateline, we put our calendars back by a day, so instead of being Sunday afternoon, it became Saturday afternoon. Then we moved the clocks forward by 2 hours to American Samoa Time, this seems like a good time zone for us. so now we are 11 hours behind UTC/GMT. I wish the phone allowed me to schedule alarms using UTC, now all my alarms for wx fax and BBC news are 2 hours early.
The AIS/GPS unit duly showed us reaching 180deg East, then flipped to 179 deg West in a second.
Earlier this morning we crossed the halfway mark, Kathy was asleep and I was on watch, this is an arbitrary point as it’s difficult to measure the distance that we halved, is it the distance we should travel, i.e. the perfect route, or the distance we have travelled and an estimate of how far our destination is away. In the end I measured the route we planned over ground and have divided it by two, and used that distance from our destination as the halfway mark which is 2297 miles We are celebrating by eating the lovely luxury French biscuits the commodore at Ichimonji yacht club gave us before we left.
Our daily run of 122 is ok considering the weather, it would be over 130 if we hadn’t lost the 2 hours.
Yesterday we saw 2 ships passing, amazingly one had to change course to give us a wide berth!
Paul Collister