Day: 9 July 2018

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