Day: 7 July 2018

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.