Author: paulcollister

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

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
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

Day 18, Sunday 8th July. 32-39N, 179-45E. Daily Run: 128 NM. Weather: 5-10 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2343 NM to go
A miserable 24 hours where the high pressure system went walkabout, and walked right up to us and is now sitting on us with a barometer reading of 1030, the chart actually has the centre at 1036, so we are a little bit out from there. Often high pressure brings with it lovely conditions, clear sunny skies, light breezes etc, but sometimes, like today it brings damp miserable fog. The winds are light and we have two wave trains, one from the SE and one from the SW, One gives us a gentle roll, the other is slamming us around, together the boat either gets off lightly, or gets pushed badly. This is like being in a rolly anchorage, but it’s been going on for 24 hours now, with no sign of stopping. Saying that, as I type, some sunshine has just broken through, lets hope this is the start of better weather. There is still a gale a few hundred mile to the north, but in retrospect, we would have done better to get closer to it.
I have been doing very minor chores, and last night I had a go at programming, and to my delight I found I can hack a few hours at the keyboard without any feelings of nausea. This is great, so I have been developing an app on my MacBook and quite enjoying it.
We ran the engine this morning for 6 hours as the sun wasn’t getting through the fog, also we are going crazy today and having showers, so the engine will heat up the hot water nicely.
In a couple of hours we cross the international date line, people often do something to celebrate this, but we won’t, I think they are getting confused with the equator. We will just watch the GPS showing us going from East to West, partly for fun, but partly because if there was going to be a glitch in the GPS software, this would be when it shows up, it must be a scenario that’s difficult to test in the lab. I still find it difficult to get around the day gain, I expect tomorrows blog will be Day 19, Sunday. This is getting to be a bit like ‘a month of sundays’ If I head back this way I lose the day I gained, but I’m wondering about that, today I gain 6 hours of Saturday and 14 hours of Sunday, but if I head back I may gain different parts of different days all together. It gets very confusing. For tax purposes, does this count as an extra day out of the country?
Kathy was delighted to hear from her family via email that England can actually win football matches, growing up in England, we always thought that having invented the game we were also brilliant at it, not so really. My brothers know a lot more than me on the subject, but I seem to recall we haven’t won this trophy since The Beatles were still gigging, and I have heard people say that if the ref had had his specs on, we might not have won that game.
We are almost half way, I think that will call for a small celebration.
Paul Collister

Day 17, 7th July. 42-35N, 177-13E. Daily Run: 135 NM. Weather: 8-10 Knots S, Sunny & fresh. 2471 NM to go
Another quiet day and night, the wind was decent through the night and we managed a daily run of 135 NM which isn’t too bad given we are in quite weak winds. This morning has the winds picking up a little so I’m hoping for a better run by this time tomorrow. We are now riding on the isobars of the Pacific High (Counterpart to the Azores High), the last few days have been spent getting through a little ridge that was pushing out of the high and giving us the light winds. We are mostly past that now, and I have slightly changed course so that we are aiming just north of the great circle path to Seattle to reach about 50deg N at about 165 deg E. But this keeps changing as the high pressure system moves around.
This morning required the spinnaker pole to be hoisted to support the genoa, given the light winds now coming over the stern quarter of the boat, this took forever, there are just so many ropes to route, uphaul, forward stay, aft stay, sheet, preventer for the main, which gets in the way, mast track uphaul and downhaul. I thought I had a decent system but it took ages to do today, and that was with it being calm.
Everything else is working just fine, we are getting enough solar power to keep everything running, with just about a 50% discharge on the battery each night. With a bit more wind on the turbine, that will reduce to about 40% I hope. Even less if we use the wind vane steering.
Kathy continues to produce wonderful meals, which become more important as time passes on as they are usually the highlight of the day. If we continue to keep with this high for the next 2 weeks, then not a lot is going to happen, so mealtimes are always something to look forward to. I finished my book about sailing from Seattle to Alaska, a good read and I hope to visit many of the places mentioned, but not the final beach, for reasons I can’t mention until Kathy has read the book.
We haven’t found a destination in Seattle yet, I like the sound of the Fishermans Terminal, mentioned in the book above, but the book is old, and I don’t know if that is even an option now. I emailed a few marinas before we left, but received no reply. I think we will stop at Port Angeles, which is the first big looking marina I can see on the chart and hope they have a visitor berth for us so we can check in there. They didn’t reply to my email either. However, after 5-6 weeks at sea, it won’t really matter if we have to drift around the Strait of Juan de Fuca / Seattle area for a day or two until we find somewhere. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here, we still two and a half thousand miles to go, hopefully tomorrow we pass the international date line when we move from the exotic East to the old West of the world and a day or two later we pass the halfway mark.
Paul Collister.

Week Two
It’s been a week of ups and downs…and side-to-sides, and pushing and shoving. Paul has described the sea state in his weather reports, along with the meteorological reasons and explanations for the rough conditions. I prefer to focus on the drama such weather created. There’s only so much you can do with words to get across how dramatic it was/still is, at times. When it began to get choppier, I carried on regardless, remembering how I dealt with this type of thing on the Atlantic crossing. I adopted the stances I used then, such as standing with feet placed well apart, body leaning against the sides and moving with the motion of the waves when preparing food or cooking in the galley, which feels a lot more graceful than it looks I suspect. A golden rule is never to try to do things with two hands – make sure one is always holding on to the many wooden ‘hand-holds’ dotted around the boat (otherwise it won’t end well). I had even got a bit blasé about it all because I had learned to sense when a convenient lull in the rocking was imminent simply through getting used to the rhythm of the waves. This would allow for a quick ‘letting go’ to carry out a two-handed task such as chopping veg or doing dishes. So far, so familiar then.
Gradually the force of the wind and waves increased, bringing with them some alarming noises and a motion that I found scary and extremely difficult to move around in, let alone do anything more ambitious than inch my way to the toilet with my back against the wall. A couple of days before the worst of it, I had prepared and cooked some tasty evening meals, and got on with daily routine stuff with only the odd annoying jerk or jolt to catch me unawares. By Saturday (30th June) I had written in my journal that it was becoming hard to sleep with all the rolling, and that movement was more restricted so we were reading and dozing a lot more during the day. It began to feel chillier, too and the sky was grey and foggy with drizzly rain falling. We put the heating on for longer intervals and played offline scrabble on Paul’s iPhone; all very cosy and the speed we were doing showed we would reach our destination a week earlier than expected. I helped Paul to change the sail set up that afternoon, which was pretty hairy with the boat listing from side to side at such sharp angles. I felt sure one of us would get tossed over the side but even that fear couldn’t detract from the spectacular sight of the Albatrosses circling around us. They were beautiful, and so huge! I’m almost sure they were Albatrosses but I could be wrong. In an effort to picture them, I found myself smiling while remembering a Monty Python sketch which features John Cleese selling Albatross as a cinema snack instead of choc ices. I also wondered how the Ancient Mariner could have been so cruel as to shoot such a lovely bird.
July dawned with the roughest day yet, and a realisation that this was a much more challenging passage than the Atlantic crossing. Sitting in the cabin I could see and hear the water crashing into the cockpit. The waves had reached about 4 metres in height and the swell was strong. The wind was also strong and the boat was hurtling through this turbulent sea (it resembled the state water looks like when boiling in a pan) at breakneck speed. The difference from any other sea state I’ve experienced was that the waves were coming from all directions, so that it was like sitting on one of those ‘bucking bronco’ machines whose main aim is to throw you onto the floor. Sunday’s journal entry plaintively and somewhat melodramatically states that ‘moving and staying upright now requires a good deal of planning, motivation and effort’. Earlier I said that it’s hard to put words together to convey how trying it was, but some of the words and phrases that came to mind as I sat there being reassured by Paul that this was nothing to worry about might help: pitching, tossing, corkscrewing, plunging, slamming, banging, crashing, bouncing, ‘being lifted off the seat’ ‘high walls of water’, waves breaking over the top of the boat, listing from side to side at speed…you get the picture. We didn’t eat much that day, but hadn’t done much to work up an appetite anyway. The only thing to do was sit it out below while Paul carried out regular weather forecasts. I have to confess I’m a touch sceptical about these forecasts, but looking at the complicated weather charts and faxes as they come through made me think you need a degree in meteorology to make sense of them.
Neither of us got seasick I’m pleased to say, and difficult as it was I’m still feeling good about the whole thing. I think much of my concerns come from not having the knowledge that Paul has about the level of danger. The loud noises and the turbulence in a storm at sea serve to make it seem more alarming than it actually is. It’s also frustrating being rendered immobile when things need doing and the thought of the whole journey being like that was disturbing to say the least. In the end I did what I always do to escape in stressful times – read! We take turns choosing music to listen to in the evenings, and I have come to appreciate more of Paul’s choices (as long as it’s not cello music or Ivor Cutler). I think he now enjoys Neil Young because he hasn’t described him as ‘whingey’ lately 😉 . The World Service provides the only source of news we get, but is sadly lacking in its World Cup coverage so I have to rely on emails about how England are doing. We’ve also listened to some entertaining old podcasts from radios 4 and 6. I’m looking forward to picking up the American radio stations when we get closer.
Things have been a lot more calm and pleasant for the last two days. I’m back to creating meals from our vast store of provisions and have been recording details of our evening meals to include in a separate blog entry later on.
We’ve changed time zones again and are now another hour ahead, in Noumea time (New Caledonia). Paul tells me we’ll be crossing the international dateline in a few days’ time and will gain a day (in Groundhog Day fashion?). I really can’t get my head around it but it will be interesting to experience when it happens (or maybe not). We were a thousand miles from anywhere yesterday, and today we are 37% of the way across. I do enjoy those sort of statistics and facts, and still like to study the route and progress on the electronic charts. We’ve only been alerted to three other vessels in the last week so we really are ‘alone on a wide wide sea’ (another apt line from ‘The Ancient Mariner’). We did, however, finally see some whales and dolphins this morning. It was worth being called out of my warm cocoon to see them. The whales were too far away to see properly but their size and spouts distinguished them from dolphins.
We head into week three with good winds predicted to push us along and with gales and hurricanes far enough away to cause us no great alarm. The main concern at the moment is that we’ve almost run out of bread and Paul would prefer to wait until next week before we use any large amount of gas to bake any. Luckily we have plenty of longlife naan and pitta breads and tortilla wraps to see us through. Just hope it’s not too rocky when the time comes for mixing, kneading and proving dough.
Kathy