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 have reached the next level of game play here on Galapagos. This is the level where all the sunny skies and lovely sailing are behind you and what’s left is all of the endurance without the fun (except we did have dolphins this morning). When we beat this level we will get sunny skies again. But for now suddenly I remember why people live in houses on land, houses that don’t ordinarily roll wildly underneath you all day and all blessed night; houses that don’t suddenly throw you against the wall as you are innocently walking down the hall; houses that don’t seem like they are out to get you.

When we are in challenging conditions like we have been the last two days, energy levels get micromanaged. Everything becomes an energy drain. Cooking? Too much energy and possibly too dangerous. Give me the protein bar and move slowly away. Going to the bathroom? Make sure it’s worth the effort. Make it count. Brushing teeth, combing hair, putting on fresh clothes- these things do not happen. It’s not that they are not important. It’s that I begin to be too tired to care. Because the other thing that doesn’t happen is good sleep.

In terms of mental health, good sleep has been my soap box for decades. Without it mood declines rapidly. Irritability increases, carb cravings begin, anxiety level goes up, the thoughts turn to darker things. The logical brain takes a time out. Sound sleep is a basic tenant of good mental hygiene.

Watch schedules are really the weak link with only two of us aboard. I do not function without decent sleep for very long. Mike does better, but for how long? People need deep restoring rest in order to make good decisions. During the first week of the passage we had benign weather conditions with lovely easy sailing. We had several days where we did nothing to the sails. The wind was steady from the right direction and the boat practically sailed itself.

Because it didn’t take much energy to keep the boat moving comfortably, sleep was not only less critical, it was easier to come by. Frequent cockpit naps helped fill in the gaps left by not getting at least 7 straight hours of shut eye at night. It wasn’t perfect but it would do. But as this weather system passes over us bringing squalls with variable winds and bigger seas it’s a whole different world out here. The rig and course require constant attention and tweaking.

Mike is experimenting with sleeping in the cockpit, a plan that gives me doubts that he is really sleeping deeply but considering he doesn’t sleep much below either, then what difference does it make? When he is below his little spidey senses about what’s going on with the boat don’t allow him to really let go and rest. I guess if he starts seeing things that I can’t see, especially if he also talks to them, then we will have a different conversation.

My suggestion of heaving to, where you back wind the sails and allow the boat to drift slowly, thereby allowing the crew to rest, has not been met with enthusiasm. It would involve removing our inner forestay so that the sail would not rub against it. While it’s not terribly hard to remove that, it’s made to be removed not permanently mounted, it’s not something you want to be doing on the fore deck in heavy weather. We like having it attached to the fore deck as it gives us an extra feeling of safety in terms of the rig, an extra piece of rigging supporting the mast.

So last night we compromised by putting away the headsail and slowing the boat way down. It wasn’t a perfect solution as we were still making way and occasionally we would be smacked around by a big wave. But it was better than nothing and I slept soundly.

Today is a new day and hopefully there will be pasta for dinner.

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