Day: 29 June 2018

Day 9, 29th Jun, 37 – 203N, 158 – 48E Daily Run: 134 nm. Weather, Grey, and bouncy. 3362 nm to go
A less than stunning daily run of 134nm, but anything over 120 is fine with me.
Weather and routing: I’m now getting a decent signal from the NOAA Weather transmitter at Hawaii, this gives me charts for the eastern side of the North Pacific, Japan only shows me the west and some middle. Consequently with all these charts, and the downloads I get from Predictwind.com via the satphone, I’m getting a better picture of the weather systems we are encountering and how best to get to our destination. At the moment we are skirting over the top of a high, not the pacific high, that’s next. This high isn’t moving much, but theres a low pressure above us moving ESE, but will shortly move to the north. We will hopefully hitch a ride on that as it goes north, then move east onto the western side of the pacific high, and ride that until we can smell the coffee (Starbucks I presume) of Seattle, then follow whatever winds we can, probably from the NE down into Seattle. Thinking about it, we won’t smell the coffee if the wind is from the West or NE. Oh well.
Not a lot else has happened, the wind has calmed to a steady 15 knots astern, but the rolling isn’t great, but thats improving. Kathy continues to work wonders in the kitchen, and I found some grips for the stove today, which we had lost. They will help hold the pans in place on the gas rings. Talking of Coffee, I managed to brew some fresh, in the cafetiere today, a first on this trip, as we had been wary of breaking the glass, easily done as this is our third on this boat, and spare glass jugs are hard to come by out here 😉 The last baguette has gone, fortunately the Japanese sliced bread is good for another year to two, not quite sure what they put in it to stop it going off, but it can’t be good for you.
My repair to the uphaul on the spinnaker pole didn’t work, it was jamming the release pins for the ends, so I’m on Mk3 now, that is up and running ok, however I suspect the chafing will still come back to bite me. I also fixed the batten in the boom sailbag, he isn’t going anywhere in a hurry now. The wooden box/tray behind the wheel fell off, as Kathy said, this looked like a schoolboy project to start with, cheap delaminating plywood that had rotted, screwed together with non stainless screws, and mounted to the pedestal stand in a well dodgy way. I have been waiting for it to fall off for years now, just so I have an excuse to make a new one. I feel confident of my skills here, as such a box was one of our first woodwork projects at school, one of only two subjects I got an ‘A’ grade for. It had dovetail joints, and was finished with a french polishing. I’m hoping Kathy won’t look at my creation and declare it to also look look a schoolboy project!
I’m currently reading ‘Passage to Juneau’ by Jonathon Raben, to pass the hours. It’s a great read, made better by the fact we will be following his route up the inner passage around Vancouver Island shortly, and I can drop marks on my Navionics chart at the places he describes that I want to visit. I recommend the book to anyone with an interest in Nautical travels, Nautical History, Native American history, Captain Vancouver and Discovery and the Vancouver Island area in general. I must thank John and Carol on SV Nerissa in Miri for giving me the book.
Paul Collister