Today is our two week anniversary of this passage and we are celebrating by clicking off the miles under sail, in the right direction. Even the sun is shining for us and the further west we go the warmer the weather gets. I am back to wearing shorts. Hoo rah! We have had a few very slow days due to light and variable winds; the kind where just when you get the sails up again and give a sigh of relief at turning off the engine, the winds die to nothing and the sails flog themselves to an early death. The motion of the boat has been horrendous and yesterday we made less than 100 miles. Ugh. So slow. This makes days like today even sweeter; may it last for hundreds of miles. Tomorrow we will have less than 1000 miles to go.

Anyway, I have time and energy to give potential cruisers an update on some of these galley tricks I have tried. Turns out I have learned a lot about preparing for this long kind of passage making. Let’s get the failures out of the way first.

1. Fresh cilantro in oil. TERRIBLE. Awful. So disappointing. Next time I will try freezing. If you tried this idea because you, too, were excited about the prospect of preserving cilantro, sorry.

2. Bimbo Bread Pudding. In Mexico they sell this stuff that’s basically bread-shaped-foodlike stuff made with a lot of preservatives and then dried. They call this toast. I call it a giant tender crouton. But since you use dried bread to make bread pudding I thought why not give it a try? I will save you the trouble by asking if you think bread crumb pudding sounds wonderful. If so, then by all means go buy some 99 cent Bimbo toast and go to it. Crumbs held together with what should be custard but somehow isn’t. I am over this experiment.

3. Storing sweet potato sourdough pancake mix in the fridge to use another day. Nope. The word ‘sour’ is under used here. Your mouth will pucker and your eyes will water. Then the fish will be fed, one way or another. Word.

4. Using the pressure cooker to make a casserole using packaged potatoes au gratin, sliced up chicken apple sausages, and frozen broccoli. Delicious sounding on paper, this does not translate well to the plate and is, in fact, a disaster. My crockpot would have made it delicious but…

5. My crockpot, the mainstay of my cooking while cruising, has been all but useless on this passage, leaving me at a loss for how to make so many of our favorite recipes. I must use the inverter to run it and because we don’t have enough sun, even on a good day, to keep the batteries topped up with solar power, the engine must be on. That’s because our boat is always facing the same direction right now and generally at least half of our panels are shaded one way or another. Also the crockpot does not have a locking lid. And this is how our African Sweet Potato Stew ended up on the floor a couple of weeks back. I miss this simple and effective galley tool and am working on a solution to that lid problem.

As an aside, I now use my pressure cooker all the time. But it just doesn’t do everything well and I am still learning how to make best use of it.

I will save the next post for the galley wins.

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Lately we have been noticing these little white flakes all over the cockpit and on the surfaces below. What the hell is this stuff, we want to know. It looks like latex paint that has flaked off but we cannot find the source and it is all over everything. Life on a boat is filled with little mysteries like this. The stuff was driving us crazy and also all I could think was how much work we were in for refinishing whatever was going bad. But why suddenly and why now? That made no logical sense.

Since the winds have calmed enough for me to move around the cockpit safely I spent time this morning cleaning the floor and surfaces, determined to once more have a boat that wasn’t covered in fine white powder, worried that Homeland Security might suspect us of being drug mules. Despite my best attempts I could not figure where this stuff was coming from. But at least we had a clean cockpit.

Then Mike poked his head up and said he had discovered the culprit. It was his foul weather gear. The rubberized, probably latex, lining had gone bad. He discovered this when he was putting on the coveralls and realized a virtual cloud of tiny bits of rubberized stuff was making him look like he was either standing in snow or had a terrible case of dandruff. They just don’t make things like they used to. I mean these coveralls are no more than 15 years old and for the last three years they have been stored in the ideal conditions found on a boat in a blistering hot climate that breaks down plastics faster than fish can fly. How dare they go bad right now as we prepare to sail north? I have a burning desire to call West Marine and give them a piece of my mind while I am buying Mike another pair just like them.

If you are wondering why Mike was wearing his foul, foul weather gear it’s because it’s cold. Someone forgot to tell the weather gods that we had expected a warm and sunny passage. I only hope they will arrange warm weather for Hawaii. We are about halfway there! Come. On. Sunshine.

Now that we know Michael needs new pants I should probably locate and check mine. If they have also gone bad I am hoping to find some new ones with chickens on them. I will call them my ‘fowlies’ .

(Sorry, Jill. Had to do it. ) 😹

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We are on day 8 of this long passage, about 2 weeks to go. We were talking last night and reflecting together about how it doesn’t seem like it’s already been a week since we left the islands. Here on a small boat where we don’t even know what time zone we are in, much less do we care about that, time is revealed to be the false construct that it really is. The only moment that time is important is that it keeps us apprised of shift changes. Otherwise it’s either daylight or not.

Our days are measured by the changes in weather, wind direction, boat comfort and course heading. One moment it’s time to make the sails bigger or smaller. Another moment it’s time to tweak the wind vane. As the boat floats across the sea, we float through this passage with it, time measured only by moments of activity and focus, carried along by forces so much greater than us they defy efforts to understand. It’s like living in a great metaphor for life overall.

After a week of this one begins to have an appreciation for why some people would rather be at sea than anywhere else. I’m not saying I am that person. Ask me when we have arrived in Washington state and I have been out here for thousands of miles, not hundreds. But the inklings of understanding are there. The world really does titrate down to
what is literally right in front of us in a way that is hard to imagine when living on land surrounded by all the things we feel responsible for controlling, or at least managing. Out here, over 1000 miles from the nearest civilization, hundreds of miles from the nearest human being, there is quite literally nothing we can do about anything anywhere but right here on this boat. Nothing.

This is both freeing and terrifying. I prefer to compartmentalize the terrifying aspects of this and focus on the freedom. If you are going to sail, as we say, ‘far away from the dock’, compartmentalization is a psychological skill you should develop. It’s one of those sailing skills people take for granted but shouldn’t. It’s exactly why people can be on a small boat in the middle of a great and powerful sea and sleep like a rock when given the opportunity. (Well, that and fatigue. )

Of course we need this construct of time, and the many other constructs we create, in order for civilization to work. But it’s interesting to experience how much it rules our thinking. I am reminded of a woman we met who was asking questions about our way of life. She asked what we did at night if we were away from land. Did we drop an anchor in the middle of the ocean? This was an intelligent person, you could see on her face that she knew that didn’t make sense even as she spoke. But she was asking from her own assumptions about how people go to bed at night. Her day stops with her little ritual of expensive evening ablutions, followed by her head lying delicately on her silky pillow, then sleeping until the alarm clock rings.

No. I said. We just keep sailing into the night and into the next day. We sail on and on in our safe little ship, our little womb on the sea. She looked at me in that way people do if they can’t quite figure out which box to put you in. You know the look: first it’s scanning you up and down as though to take the measure of your physical self. Then one part confusion, one small part fear, a bit of amazement, some shaking of the head and looking away. ‘Better you than me, sister.’, she says. This part of her that I represent right then, the part that would be outside the box of the culture she lives in, has just been put away, compartmentalized. It resides safely somewhere in the darkness of her own shadow.

And it’s the part of me that she represents that lives in a compartment all her own in my own psyche right now. The part that wears the uniform of the expectations of others: the hair, the branded clothing, the jewelry, the nails. Oh yes, and the makeup. When we get back to a land life I will take this aspect of me out to play for awhile. We will get our hair done and go to Nordstrom and buy pretty clothes. We will go to bed at a certain hour and make appointments and have more complex routines. But for now, we sail on.

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