“Hand me my camera so I can get a photo of you in that outfit. It’s on the nav station and I don’t want to move.”

It’s not laziness that led me to make this request, not really. It’s more that I was almost warm and didn’t want to disturb the bubble of reasonable temperature that enveloped me here in what I call my hovel, a messy area on the settee complete with a selection of blankets and pillows. Yesterday, when I wasn’t cooking over a blessedly hot stove, I spent the entire day sitting here. All the things I did were done from this few square feet of space, covered in 100% spun polyester blankets, the only things that feel dry on the entire boat. Right now, natural fibers suck. Literally. They suck moisture from the air making us feel not just cold, but wet as well.
I keep the vision of my blessed children encircled once more by my loving momma’s arms firmly in the foreground of my mind to keep the feeling of chumpness for leaving Hawaii at bay. (Since they are both well into adulthood this vision is fleeting at best, but I need to believe my suffering has meaning. Just let me have this without judging, ‘kay?)

I know what you’re thinking: cry me a river, right? Well if you had seen this morning what we awoke to as the daily watery dawn crept in you would be more sympathetic to our plight. Grey gnarly seas, grey skies, even the air is grey. Yesterday we were visited by whales. They were grey. Grey grey grey. Not a blue hue anywhere. Mold has started to take hold on the inside of our dodger from the constant dampness. The mold? It is grey.

The boat was so rolly last night that over time my polar fleece bottom sheet worked its way completely off the mattress and I woke to find it wadded up under my feet. My hair, never my best asset in the morning, looked like a small rodent had made its burrow on my head and claimed it for its own. Honestly if the boat keeps this up my pillow will wear the hair right off of my head due to chafing; like those babies left on their backs in their cribs for too long, I predict the development of a bald spot.

Mike was in the cockpit because he can bear it up there. He had on my foulies, a thick wool sweater, his hiking boots to keep his feet warm, and I handed up his wool cap; an old friend that was a welcome touch to his increasingly heavy, grey ensemble. Today he added his sailing jacket. What’s next? Gloves? I tell you the last few days have given my daydreams of sailing in higher latitudes a bit of a challenge as the reality of cold sinks into my bones.

People who have been on board Galapagos will remember that we have a diesel heater and may wonder why we are not using it. The answer lies in the installation of said heater, which was on the boat when we bought it, a fact which I mention so you will know we were not in charge of that installation. In a word, if there is any wind the installation is worthless. Wind above 10 knots is likely to blow out the flame because someone called ‘Charlie Noble’ is the wrong Charlie for the task. Yesterday Mike did his darndest to get that stove going, only to fill the cabin with choking diesel smoke. A smoke filled cabin is not a good look when you are still 800 miles from land. So we have no heat to speak of unless we keep the oven going. Running the engine charges batteries and heats up the cabin and heats water for us, but we refuse to make way with the engine at this point so other than charging batteries because solar panels don’t do well in fog, it feels wasteful. So we layer on th e
clothes and count the days until we are back in summer temperatures. We understand that the interior of Washington state has finally found its summer legs. Too bad by the time we get there my summer legs will be as of the whiteness of lilies again.

In other news, apparently 17 days is about how long it takes my psychological walls of compartmentalization to begin to crack. Looking back at my journal from the passage to Hawaii, during that passage also day 17 was the day I had a moment of panicky realization. I wrote previously on the blog about how I manage to be this far from everything land based by not thinking too hard about that and focusing on the tasks in front of me. It’s not that I don’t know where I am or that I don’t realize how isolated we are. It’s that it does no good to dwell on that when there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I have to find a way to stick it out and stay mentally strong. Being 1500 miles from the nearest coastline is not a place to allow weakmindedness to creep in.

Yesterday I felt the first rift in those walls as a mild panic crept into my awareness. I could almost see water trickling through openings in the mental dams I have built to be able to embrace the greatness of passage making. We still have about 6 days to go and suddenly that felt like a very long time to be out here. Suddenly the cold water surrounding the boat felt deadly, the sea a malevolent force. I knew I better not allow that feeling to take hold. It wouldn’t do to go down that rabbit hole of dread. It’s ugly down there, with monsters.

These moments remind me of when I was pregnant with Andrew. One day I was resting and had the sudden overwhelming feeling that my body had been taken over by an alien. I was so close to having a real panic over that. Of course what I should have realized was that the baby was a boy, so that’s why it felt alien. But what I did to cope was to take a nap. It worked and I awoke with completely loving feelings toward the little being who kept me up at night.

Armed with that experience and others like it, yesterday I did the natural thing and took a long and impressive nap. There’s a piece of advice there for all the Covid 19 shut ins. When things feel overwhelming a good nap is just the thing. In the past I have been nap avoidant, but out here I have nothing more interesting going on. I awoke in a better frame of mind ready to greet the next week and get this passage under out belt.

Less than a week to go if we can stay away from the light wind areas that are emerging. We are trying to outrun them but we shall see. Our winds have been a little stiffer than we are used to but we are sailing well and really clocking the miles. I’ve got a nice potato leek fish chowder for supper, big chunks of Dorado surrounded by creamy goodness. And a beauty of a loaf of sourdough bread I made yesterday. I have a lovely sourdough starter that has been sitting collecting Wild Pacific yeast over the course of thousands of sea miles. I call it Yeast of Eden (TM, maybe?) Hit me up for some when you see us. We will be the ones with all the clothes on.

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Let me describe for you our world right now.

Flying the spinnaker making 6-7 knots, heading northeast toward Cape Flattery, currently located at about the same latitude as Newport, Oregon. That’s the only respectable thing about our situation right now. We have well and truly sailed into what (sadly) passes for a Pacific Northwest summer out here on the wild, grey ocean. Yesterday evening we had a dense layer of fog, our first in three years, to remind us why we will spend the money on radar before our next big trip. This morning we have a low marine layer of clouds with only an occasional breakthrough of a weak and watery sun. My beloved sunglasses sit, forgotten, on the nav station. The status of our cockpit cushions: cold, moist, salty. The status of our salon cushions: salty, moist, cold. The status of the floor: moist, salty, cold. The status of the comforter I pulled out, grateful I had the forethought to keep such things even when we had temperatures over 100 degrees in Mexico: clammy. Our skin is salty in spite of hot
showers at sea. We travel in our foul weather gear and wool socks. Only the visions of clasping our little family tightly to the old maternal breast keep me from turning this boat around and heading back to Hawaii. My tan is fading as we speak. Curses.

Yesterday we caught two albacore tuna. The first one got away as we were trying to land him. Landing a big fish on this boat is just not easy. Even if we ease the sails to slow down we are still traveling pretty fast when dragging a fish. There is a lot of stuff in the way like solar panels, the dinghy davits, and our grill, plus the rigging on the aft deck, not to mention our high freeboard. It’s an obstacle course back there and we do love to fish. So we are busy redesigning the aft deck to make it safer and easier to bring a fish on board. I have great video of the one that got away. The second one I got to reel in and Mike got video of me which is way too long but fairly amusing. We will put all these videos on a page for readers when we get back. We landed the second fish as much of the fight was already out of him before we even noticed we had one on the hook. He had taken so much line out that had he still been really fighting I probably would not have been strong enou gh to
bring him close to the boat. We hope to arrive home with a freezer full of fresh fish all neatly packaged with my handy heat sealer within 30 minutes of being caught. Mmmmm.

Can I just give a shout out to our spinnaker here? What a great sail. If you want a smooth ride a spinnaker is the way to go and we are really putting ours to the test. We do hate the spinnaker sock, however, because it almost always gets caught on the clew of the sail as it’s being hauled up, creating what we call a shit show on the fore deck as I lower the sail so Mike can sort it out again, then raise it back up. Sometimes we do this multiple times before we are successful at flying the sail. We have a lot of creative ways to express our irritation with that piece of equipment. We spent well over an hour on deck yesterday morning trying to sort that thing out. I jumped that spinnaker probably 8 times before we got it right and I have the painful shoulder to show for it. Mike’s adrenal glands took a workout as he maneuvered on a slippery foredeck with very deliberate caution. Even with our offshore vests on we don’t want to fall in this cold water. We want the sail put on a
continuous furler, which will make our lives that much better out here. Mike has that project on his new spreadsheet of boat projects.

By the way, if you have been following our gps track you will note that our track last night was wobbly and in the wrong direction. That’s because the wind shifted a bit and in order to stay the course we would have had to gybe the spinnaker in the dark. That means put the sail on the other side of the bow. This involves a lot of work on deck and running the sheet along the new side of the boat, work we won’t do in the dark unless it is absolutely necessary, which it wasn’t. So we gave up a few miles of east to have a pleasant night and stay safe. Always a good choice in my book. We gybed the sail when what passes for a sun came up this morning.

Did you notice that reference to a spreadsheet above? We now have a spreadsheet of boat projects to be accomplished before we make another voyage. Yes there are enough projects in our heads that Mike has created a document to manage them. So for now, our forward thinking is along the lines of WHEN we go again, not IF. This ocean sailing has got under our skin. In spite of being cold and moist and salty, we still love it out here. Today we hope for another tuna. There is room in the freezer. Here, fishy fishy!

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One thing I can say about this whole voyaging thing: just when you start saying things like “best passage ever!” Or “man, I could keep this up for a month easily!” the gods of cruising over hear you and take a meeting about your seeming complacency. The cruising gods, including but not limited to winds and waves, do not like to be taken for granted and so they decide you have had enough of the good times and they offer you a choice of different sufferings.

In our case we started with about a week of intense and beautiful fast tradewinds sailing. I tell you what, those are the days dreams are made of. Then we got a few days of flat seas and making way under spinnaker, still really dreamy conditions that allowed us to do simple things like sleep and bake bread and view that magnificent Neowise Comet, streaking across the night sky.

Now we have begun to make our way east toward the coast, still over 1300 miles away. The Pacific high we have been skirting continues to morph and move around, but predictably, as the winds move around the high in a clockwise direction, now that we are making a turn east the winds are directly behind us. This wouldn’t be so bad except the seas are fairly big for such light winds, about 3-5 feet. So to sail comfortably we would need to sail due east almost, keeping the waves at an angle to our stern rather than directly behind us. Doing that would certainly be a bad idea as it would sail us right into the middle of the high pressure area and there we would sit. No bueno, as we say.

So our choices of suffering are thusly: suffer through sailing slowly downwind and rolling back and forth, but still making way and in the right direction, or turn on the engine and power north.

Most people probably would turn on the engine. And honestly that’s usually what we would do. But where is the challenge in that? Where is the learning in that? So far on this passage we haven’t used our engine to make way. Not only does that give us a feeling of great satisfaction, it has offered us opportunities for deep learning as sailors. We have learned so much about our boat and our sail systems and what needs improving that using the engine feels like it would be a missed opportunity. So we choose for now to suffer through the rolling, although this morning, after a second sleepless night for us both, crew moral was to a point where I might have agreed had Mike suggested we throw in the towel. I am so glad I have a sailing partner who doesn’t give up easily. When I am feeling weak he stays the course. When he is feeling discouraged I try to stay the course for him. We are still under sail, still under way, and going in the right direction. Take that, cruising god’s!

With well over 1000 miles to miles to go there is still plenty of opportunity for us to get too tired to care, or for conditions to deteriorate to the point where it’s just stupid not to use the engine. After all, a good engine is a necessary piece of safety equipment. But we are in no real hurry. A few days here or there isn’t a big deal at this point. We can afford the luxury of sailing slowly. After all, how often in life do you get an absolutely front row seat for viewing a comet, night after night?

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