Week One
We left the port of Kushimoto in Japan a week ago today after a final provisioning trip (involving the town’s three supermarkets) for bread and fresh produce. In a departure from our normal routine, we shopped separately, each returning to the boat to deposit bags and then cycling off to get more. This method worked very well for lots of reasons 😉 . While stowing it (and adding it to the inventory in my notebook), I became convinced we had enough food for a return trip and an Atlantic crossing as well!
Anyway, as I type this on Thursday 28th June, I note that the conditions are the same as those we experienced once out into the open sea on the first day of our passage. It’s cool, cloudy and we are rocking from side to side. Waves are rolling in from the south and hitting the starboard side with some force. On that first day, I wrote that the wind propelled us along and we made good progress, which is happily still the case. Paul said earlier that we are about a fifth of the way now, which if things continue as they are shaves a week off the original predicted time.
This first week has been all about adjusting. Implementing the four hour watch system didn’t really kick in until a few days into the trip. This was mainly due to Paul needing to work on the sails and fix one or two things early on, making it tricky to keep a strict four hours on, four hours off when things needed sorting during my watch. There were also shipping lanes to negotiate, and some huge fishing vessels that Paul had to steer us round when their lights made me lose perspective in the dark. These obviously petered out, the further away from the coast we got, and now it’s quite exciting when a ship pops up on the AIS (usually about 60 miles away). We’ve also had to adjust to an erratic sleep and meal regime. I imagine it’s a bit like working night shifts and feeling rather disorientated until the body gets used to it. Early on, I found it difficult to sleep at 8am after doing the 4am watch. I wanted my usual morning coffee and I knew that would keep me awake which would would then make it hard to be alert for the midday watch when I craved snoozing. It’s also strange to be feeling hungry for ‘breakfast’ at 3am. I have dealt with the irregular meal times by simply eating little during the day and preparing a meal for both of us to eat at 7pm. Gradually, we’ve learned to be flexible about watches and make the most of the fact that one of us is invariably wide awake while the other is feeling drowsy. It’s working well so far, and in truth the watches are easy at this stage (easier for me than Paul I know).
A more literal adjustment concerning time has been moving it on an hour. I found it disconcerting one morning to see that the sun had already risen by 4am, when previously it hadn’t been until much later. Consulting the chart, we put ourselves onto Saipan time which is in the Australian time zone. Moving an hour forward will continue periodically throughout the trip, which is what we did on the Atlantic crossing to avoid confusion.
The days in-between this lurching from side to side on a rough sea have seen us enjoying/experiencing beautifully calm, sunny days, warm evenings, torrential rain, foggy afternoons and the up and down motion of the boat pitching from from stern to bow. All of this is familiar to us and completely expected. It’s a challenge to do things sometimes but one that I quite relish – like pitting my wits against the jerking and shoving to produce a meal for example. Both of us continue to watch for whales but have yet to spot any. There have been lots of birds, though. Big, and brown and white in colour, they circle and glide and swoop all around the boat, increasing in number as the day goes on. Paul thinks they associate boats with fish being thrown over the side and are waiting to dive for it (there’s not much chance of that happening on this boat 😉 ). Today, though we haven’t seen a single one.
All in all we are coping well and enjoying the passage. Paul fixes things as they break, which have thankfully only been minor things. It made me smirk last night when he used the word ‘when’ as opposed to ‘if’ during a conversation about things breaking. I confess that I miss news from home, chatting with family on messenger and the instant information the internet provides when you just have to know something, so spoiled have I become by online distractions. The upside is there is all the more time for reading. I’ve gone from having six or seven books on the go to ten or more, which includes those on Audible. Audible is wonderful for a trip like this; no lights needed, no reading glasses needed, and that blissful comfort of having a story read to you.
Hopefully by the time I come to write about the second week, we’ll have seen whales or sharks or dolphins and will still be zooming across the Pacific a lot faster than we anticipated. I’ll also elaborate a bit more about provisions and the challenge of cooking meals in ‘bucking bronco’ conditions.
Kathy
Day: 28 June 2018
Day 8, 28th Jun, 36 – 25N, 156 – 01E Daily Run 167 nm. Weather, Grey, and rough. 3485 nm to go
Day 8, 28th Jun, 36 – 25N, 156 – 01E Daily Run 167 nm. Weather, Grey, and rough. 3485 nm to go
We have now been at sea for 7 days, 7 days since we cast off in Kushimoto. We have travelled 877 miles, out of 4632, leaving 3485 to go, so we are 20% of the way.
I must say it feels more like 3 days than 7, often the days blur together, last night I was up for a lot of the night worrying about the sails and mast and trying to make sense of the weather, consequently, I don’t have a normal concept of the start and end of a day.
If we can maintain these sort of speeds, which I think unlikely, we will indeed take another 4 weeks or less to reach our destination. A quick check on fuel, water, gas and food shows us to be well stocked.
The wind continued to increase on the starboard bow yesterday until it was around 20-25 knots. This made for an uncomfortable passage as the waves grew in size as well and we were pounding a bit into the sea. I had put the mainsail up to make the most of the conditions, something that is needed when going upwind. However by the time I came to take the genoa in, due to the force of the wind, I found it was too late and had to winch hard on the furler to douse it, unfortunately this put the sail on too tight and I ran out of furling line. So I had to content myself with a small headsail of about 1 metre for the next day, with its sheet sitting in the way of the staysail. However with the main and staysail, we chopped along at a decent 6-7 knots for most of the day and night. By the early hours, as the sun was rising I was able to put the staysail away and let out more genoa as the wind had turned behind us. I also brought the mainsail down, this had been bothering me, firstly the batten in the sail bag/lazyjack bag was trying to escape aft, it has tried this before and I thought I had sewn the strap on well that retains it, but it has ripped it apart. Secondly there was a groaning sound coming from the mast as we rolled and the big gusts hit us. I spent an age at the mast, being thrown around trying to find the root of the noise, but I came to the conclusion it’s a halyard vibrating inside the mast. More investigation is needed when it’s a bit calmer. The current setup with just a genoa flying at the front of the boat with the wind on the starboard quarter works well, and there are only a few things to break.
We have passed 155 deg W which is the point I had in mind to start our turn towards the great circle path that takes us to Seattle. The great circle path is the shortest distance between to points on a sphere/globe. However when the same route is plotted on a normal mercator projection chart, it looks like a big arc going way off course. (Pic attached). So I have started edging towards that route, but only slowly as I want to try to stick closer to the currents for a little longer. By tomorrow we should be aiming directly at the Juan de Fuca straits some 3500 miles away. All we have to do now is follow the winds keeping as close to that route as possible. Our main consideration is to ride over the top of the Pacific High, that’s a high pressure weather system, not the latest Californian trend. However I don’t know where it is yet, thats a job for later.
Other than that, not a lot to report. we spend our days when the weather is like this just lazing around, trying to read, and downloading wx forecasts. I have put off the water maker repair until its calmer, we put the clocks forward an hour, Kathy didn’t like the sun rising at 3AM. We are now on Chamorro Standard time.
Paul Collister
