by Jason – Page 2 – A Year and a Day

So close! Third update on the passage to Hawaii

DEBONAIR is (still) on passage from Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas bound for Oahu. This is the third update from members of our crew.

12/8 Saturday (Day 12)
Sailed due north at 6.5 kts. Retarded clocks 30 minutes to Hawaii time—UTC 10.

12/9-Sunday (Day 13)
Overcast. Continued due north to get ahead of big northeasterly sea and wind forecast. Bashing into a north sea so that we’ll be able to turn west when the forecasted big northeast seas arrive tomorrow.

12/10-Monday (Day 14)

from ARLO–
The big seas that were forecast have arrived—now mostly out of the northeast. We’ve made our westerly turn and are now steering 270*m, and we are only 670 nautical miles east of the Big Island. It is fun being in the big seas when you are on deck, watching them come rearing up behind you, and then feeling the rush of speed as you surf down them, only to have them pass under you and go roaring off. It is so cool to look out at the sea, at first only seeing 200 yards or less and then seeing for miles and miles as Debonair lifts up over a swell. Right now at 2005 (8:05 p.m.) we are under the smallest sail we have ever been under at sea, staysail and single-reefed mizzen, and we are still roaring along at 6.5 knots.

I finished my knife lanyard, and boy is it handsome. It attaches to my belt loop and then the 6-strand sennit part of it runs down to my pocket where it clips on to my knife. Tomorrow it’s back to schoolwork.

From ALMA–
Today has been a down day. There are 15’ swells and I have been seasick all day. But I had a letter [ed. note—family and friends sent us of with a sheaf of letters marked to be opened on particular days] that said, “Alma, perhaps open this after a storm or just a challenging day.” So I opened it, and it put a big smile on my face. I had been saving the letter waiting to see if a worse day was coming. It had been tantalizing me. I was so curious about what was inside. But I decided that today was the day and it really improved my day. In it was a note and a pin of a boat. The boat looks like it’s going down wind, and it’s very intricate.

12/11-Tuesday (Day 15)

From CAITLIN–
The seas are big enough to be impressive without being frightening, and Debonair, with her full keel and heavy displacement, is handling them beautifully. Our windvane steering mechanism, on the other hand, isn’t as good at handling the big following seas, so we’re steering by hand and I spend the hours of my daylight watches watching the ocean. Like fire, the seas are dynamic, always moving, but they have the solidity of a landscape. When we are on top of a sea, we look upwind across a bowl-shaped valley of water up to the next sea rising on the far side of the valley.

There are a couple of wave trains, each coming to us from its own enormous gale far north of Hawaii. At first the north swell predominated; now we are sailing on a broad reach before a northeast swell. There’s still a bit of a north sea coming through though and sometimes the two wave trains are superimposed on each other for a bigger, steeper sea.

Today is the third day of this weather; we probably have four to go until we get into the lee of the Big Island of Hawaii. That’s a lot of days of watching these seas. And listening to them.

The waves are fractal: the big seas are covered with smaller waves, each of which has miniature waves racing across its face. In addition to the splashing and rushing of water running by our hull, there’s the waterfall roar as the tops of the tallest seas tumble and break. And there’s the swoosh of small waves playing out on the longer seas. But my favorite ocean sound now comes from the white foam that streaks across all the bigger seas—it is the constant hiss of bubbles popping—zillions and zillions of bubbles, to be technical.

Down below it’s quieter, until we get a good roll, and then all kinds of items—despite our best efforts at stowing—clatter and clank. Toothbrushes in their holders, books on the shelves, a headlamp hanging on a hook—each thing makes a tiny noise and together the tiny noises are so loud. We are all dreaming of the still, quiet nights in Hawaii.

FROM ARLO–
Talk about crazy. Today I spent surfing down huge (10-15’) swells, reading up in Bowditch [ed. Note: Nathaniel Bowditch’s Practical Navigator is the classic and complete reference for all things navigational] and calculating the distance form Hawaii. (The equation 1.15√h, with h being the height of eye or height of the object off the water will give you the distance away you can see an object in nautical miles.) The top of the Big Island should be visible at 128 nautical miles away. As of 1000 this morning, we had only 585 nm to go before we get under the lee of the Big Island.

Early this morning we struck the staysail and mizzen, and raised the jib, and surfed down waves at over 10 knots. But then we decided it was too much so we switched the jib for the staysail. Remember yesterday’s sail configuration? Today we went for 6-8 hours under staysail alone, making 6+ knots. This afternoon we raised the fore t’gallant topsail with one reef. Just kidding. We actually raised the reefed mizzen to keep our speed up.

Dinner tonight was the highlight of the day, though. It was “confit de canard,” or, as I call it, duck in a can. It was incredibly good, especially when eaten over mashed potatoes and sauteed cabbage, as we had it.

Finally, this evening I saw a shooting star as I was reclining in the cockpit brushing my teeth. Ahh . . . life on a boat.

12/12—Wednesday (Day 16)

from ARLO-
I stuck my head up on deck this morning to talk to my mom, who was on watch. She asked me, “Do you have any ideas for breakfast or should I give you mine?” She suggested I make scones. We doubled the recipe, which called for 8 C of flour, and I made two trays worth of fat scones. We ate them hot with butter and pamplemousses on the side. It was incredible, which I can say even though I had a hand in making them.

We began the day under staysail and mizzen and at lunch, Alma announced that we had made our best day’s run yet of 155 nautical miles. In the afternoon we wanted a little more sail, so we raised the trysail on a broad reach, which worked surprisingly well. The trysail is made of neon orange and white stripes, and looks great when it’s flying proudly.

All in all, today was pretty good, if a bit slow. I’ve been working on a design for a tool to measure latitude. I’ve also been doing math, and I find that math lessons tend to make a day slow.

12/13—Thursday (Day 17)

from ALMA–
Tomorrow morning we might be able to see the Big Island of Hawaii. Then it will be about two or three days until we get to Oahu, but we’ll be in sight of land the whole time. Seeing land will make it seem less like we are in the middle of nowhere. Being in the middle of nowhere does have benefits, like the night being so dark that you can see a whole sky of stars—that feels magical.

But now we are thinking of going back home. It seems crazy. School, cars, internet, everyone speaking English, not so many stars. Wow.

from JASON–
Lunch today was chili soup and quesadillas. We eat so well, despite the absurd conditions. In the galley making lunch today, Caitlin had to contend with a deep roll. She could mostly predict that, even work with it, moving to starboard on a starboard roll and port on a port roll. The roll wasn’t entirely regular though, with multiple wave trains combining to make Debonair gyrate as she rolled and sometimes abruptly lurch as she came down off a bigger wave and shouldered into a smaller one. In the midst of this she had a hot pot of soup on the stove, had to ladle that soup into five bowls, and manage those bowls once they were full. Nothing was lost this time though, and she called for help to fireline the bowls, napkins, spoons and the tray of quesadillas up on deck. As the boat heaved, we passed the bowls, tilting our arms and hands first this way, then that, to keep the soup in. We held one others’ bowls to allow us to maneuver into strategic eating spots in the cockpit. We settled into our nooks, and pressed our feet against the binnacle, the mast, the opposite seat to wedge ourselves into place. Then we swayed our torsos to the swaying of the boat, and held our bowls close to our chins to try to prevent the soup from blowing downwind onto our neighbor. We weren’t entirely successful, but we were all wearing foul weather gear, so we cleaned up well enough. I risked balancing a quesadilla on my knee, and was quickly spooning my chili, when we all heard the familiar sound of a larger than usual wave swelling up to meet us and slapping up against the side of the boat. We hunkered our shoulders down involuntarily, conditioned from the last few days of bigger wind and sea. The water flew straight up and the wind caught it and blew it right over us. It caught me full in the back, running straight down the neck of my coat as it always does, spraying my chili with a salt water seasoning, and washing my quesadilla down into the cockpit well where it bobbed around like a little boat. It ended up under Alma’s feet and I called “Alma, grab it!” but of course she didn’t know what I was talking about. I got the quesadilla back before it was too soggy. It was fine.

Despite all the complications of eating, we enjoy our meals out on deck in the weather. The view of the constantly moving ocean and the ever-changing sky are endlessly interesting. Shearwaters and petrels circle, swooping and diving along the valleys and crests of the waves hunting for fish with incredible dexterity that makes me feel how out of place we are here terrestrial creatures staggering around our lurching boat with our chili bowls. When we finished our lunch, Arlo read us another chapter of Farley Mowat’s “The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float.” The humor in the book is almost as uplifting at Arlo’s obvious joy in that humor.

As much as we like making passages, we’re all looking forward to just sighting Hawaii after about two weeks at sea now. Today, in his noon report, Arlo calculated the time tomorrow when we might see the big island. Depending on our speed and the visibility we could see it as early as mid morning and as late as, well. . . I suppose if it’s cloudy again we might not see it tomorrow. We’re excited about it in any case. It’s such a massive island compared to anything else we’ve seen. At nearly 14,000 feet, the two cones of Hawaii are higher than most of the Sierra Nevada, and are about three times as tall as anything else in the Pacific that we’ve seen. In ideal conditions you could see it from about 125 nautical miles away. In addition to being a grand sight, that massive island creates its own weather in a number of ways. We’ll enjoy getting a break from the wind in the lee of the island.

Life out here very much follows routines. Arlo is on watch now. I’ll relieve him at three and will be on deck through dinner, when everyone will join me around sunset. It’s a spectacular time of day, and the dining challenges and entertainment are enhanced by the difficult visibility in the low light.

12/14 (Day 18)

From Caitlin–
The sea is somewhat diminished today, as is the wind, so we hoisted the mainsail or the first time in many days. We spent the late afternoon and through the night on a broad reach with double reefed main and staysail, making 7 – 8 knots, often making ten+ knots down the front of seas.

The seawater is still warm enough that we are all still barefoot in our foul weather gear, but we slept under a comforter last night for the first time since March. Now I’m looking forward to being in sweater weather someday again!

12/15 (Day 19)

This morning we rounded the southern point of the Big Island. As the wind wrapped around the point, it intensified and we were screaming along before a moderate sea. Arlo and Alma joined Jason on deck at 0500 and each took an hour at the helm. It was moving to see these capable sailors wrestling the wheel to steer us down the face of the seas.

And then the wind died. We’re motor-sailing in the wind shadow of the Big Island, heading north toward Oahu. The seas are smaller and the sun is out, so we are hanging damp laundry and generally cleaning up the boat after the week of boisterous weather. There’s still quite a ways to go, but it’s all in relatively protected waters. We’ll let you know when we arrive.

2nd Update from the Marquesas-Hawai’i Passage

12/2

from Caitlin:

The wind has veered a bit just abaft the beam and the sailing is easy. The seas are small, and we are enjoying all the things you enjoy in lovely weather at sea–sky, clouds, stars, flying fish, sea birds, sunsets and sunrises, phosphorescence, shooting stars galore. Seriously, until the hours I’d spent on night watch this year, I didn’t realize how many kinds of “shooting stars” we can see. There are fast ones, super slow ones, ones that seem to flare up. There are short ones and ones that seem to arc across half the sky. And there are so many—on a clear and moonless three-hour I’ll often see 6-8 shooting stars, even without watching for them.

We celebrated crossing the equator back into the northern hemisphere last night with an offering of rum to Neptune and an offering of a linzertorte decorated to look like a globe for us mortals. Near the equator here, we can see the quintessential northern hemisphere constellation, the Big Dipper, ahead of us and the Southern Cross astern.

This morning we are doing our usual stuff–washing dishes, downloading weather reports, handling sail changes, changing the rags in the forepeak that soak up the somewhat-diminished leaks. There’s always someone on watch, often someone in the galley, usually someone napping. Right now Arlo and Alma are working on Spanish and math respectively, as bigger seas and higher winds are forecast in a few days.

From Alma:

Last night I dreamed that we got to Hawai’i. We were in a wide bay with a narrow entrance. This morning we were getting the boat cleaned up when my mom said, “Alma, it’s time.” I woke up and realized I had been dreaming. We are still on passage and right then I had to go on watch. Bummer. What did happen last night though is that we crossed the equator. I didn’t end up getting up for it which is fine with me. I was really tired this morning anyway. But I was definitely awake by the time the linzertorte came out for breakfast! It was delicious. I don’t know if I have ever had one before, but it is definitely competing for the “Alma’s top five desserts” award!

12/3

from Alma:

Still sailing along.

We are more downwind today.

Days are shortening.

12/4

from Arlo:

Nights at sea are interesting. We usually eat dinner in the cockpit, and then we will read aloud from our book. Then either my dad or JT will go below to do the dinner dishes, while my sister or I will stand by to dry the dishes, because you can’t leave dishes out to dry at sea. Then I will go on deck to brush my teeth and floss. Then depending on the time, I will either read and then go to bed, or just go to sleep immediately. If I wake up in the night, I will occasionally go give the person currently on night watch some company, because I only stand the dawn watch and an afternoon watch. We are still pretty fished out, and although we had a can of mackerel for lunch today, we are still not fishing today. We finished our last bananas, and of the 100-200 that we had on board, we only lost a few. That’s a lot of bananas to eat in one week. My sister and I are cramming in as much school work as possible, because after the next few days, we will have bigger seas all the way to Hawaii.

12/5

from Jason:

0015 hours. Still on Marquesas time, ½ hour ahead of Hawaii. The wind went light and so far South of East that the roll was shaking the sails more than the wind was driving them. We looked at the weather forecast after dinner and after lots of deliberation, we struck everything but the main, double reefed the main and fired up and steamed due North. So here we are now, the wind light and behind us, the main prevented out to starboard, just barely held full by that little tailwind and running along at 2200 RPM’s and traveling five to six knots. We’re solidly into the ITCZ now. I think we were at about 6 degrees 30 minutes Norrth when we made the sail change. At 0030 hours, just now, we reached seven degrees North. It’d be great to steam straight through this ITCZ and get going in the Northeast trades.

Arlo’s done a couple after dinner readings of Farley Mowat’s “The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float.” Mowat’s way of exaggerating and making his language mock eloquent is great. Arlo’s reading of that too. He’s got good dramatic tone and gets really into it at the funny parts. His voice accentuates the characters and their emotions and he speeds up a bit as if he’s got to go faster to get it all out before he cracks up.

12/6

from Arlo:

This morning I cut up two huge pamplemousses for breakfast to go with cereal. We still have around 20 pamplemousse at least, plenty to get to Hawaii on. We have some bigger seas coming our way and some accompanying heavy winds. I mentioned this in the previous musing, but we have been watching the weather files that we get through the satellite receiver, and it still looks rough, and although I have never been in seas like that I am interested to sea (Ha-ha!) what they are like. I also will not have to do much school work if any at all, which will be nice. We just made it out of the ITCZ yesterday and luckily for us it only took about 12-18 hours of motorsailing to get through it. We got several rain showers, from the frequent squalls, and we all took the opportunity to wash some clothes, and ourselves. My sister and I have moved from the forepeak for more comfortable sleeping places in the big seas, and hopefully that should make sleeping a bit easier.

12/7

from Jason:

It’s about 2PM. It’s a popular time to try to catch a quick nap. Arlo’s on watch. I’ll relieve him in a second. We’re under double reefed main and staysail and are flying along at six to seven knots. We’re a day and a half into the Northeast trades and moving North fast now. We plan on riding North for a few more days to be upwind of Hawaii when the wind and seas increase. That will put us in position for a roaring broad reach down to Hawaii. We’ll see!

We’re at that point in the passage now, 11 days in, where the days all fly by and run together in one big memory of constant motion of sea and sky. Our only company is an occasional tropic bird circling the boat, or petrel speeding along the waves. We’ve gotten to that place where it feels like we just do the same thing again and again and eventually we’ll be there.

Homeward Bound, part I

Tuesday, 11/27
Day 1

Caitlin:
Our last day in French Polynesia we were anchored in the long, narrow Baie Hooumi. We spent the day preparing to go to sea—anchors secured, propeller cleaned, bread made. We rowed five half-mile round trips to the beach to fill jerry cans with spring water to fill Debonair’s tanks.

In the late afternoon we went ashore for the last time. Walking through the village of a few dozen houses, we admired the mangoes hanging from huge trees. We discussed the skinniness of the horses tied along our route. Arland Alma took advantage of a long hill and ran up it. On our way home, a man called afer us: “Ka’oha! Parlez-vous francais?” So we turned back and met Patrice and his grown niece and nephew, and when we left their family compound we were carrying a large stalk of bananas (it would become the third one hanging in our cabin), a bag of mangoes, a bag of limes, and a bag of guavas. These were not small bags. “It is not good to refuse, madame.” We are no longer surprised by this ubiquitous generosity.

We sailed from Nuku Hiva under gray skies this morning. This will be a relatively dark passage—the moon is about half full and waning. It won’t rise tonight until just before midnight and it will rise later and smaller every night this week. The days will get shorter as we sail due North into the Northern hemisphere’s winter. Both my watches will be dark ones.

But there will be fruit!

Jason:
Underway from Nuku Hiva! Three nap below. Arlo’s got the deck watch and the helm. I’m on the high side looking down to Nuku Hiva as we sail over her eastern, windward shore. The final northeastern point is sliding off astern. It’s all gray all around today. Ua Huka is just visible in the clouds off to the East.

Wednesday, 11/28
Day 2

From Arlo:
Yesterday, 10AM, we departed Hooumi, Nuku Hiva, Marquesas bound for Hawaii, three weeks away. This morning we caught a smallish Mahi-Mahi, which we turned into an excellent poisson cru for lunch with cucumber, onion and lime juice. Now it is 4:30p.m., and we just raised the staysail, so now we have all four sails set: mizzen, main, staysail and jib. Some large dolphins came and went. Now it is just us cooking along with just enough wind to keep us at five to six knots. We have been on a beam to close reach since Nuku Hiva, so we can keep some portlights open, but, sadly not the forepeak hatch because of the spray. There were 2.9 meter seas heading towards us from the north predicted, but so far they haven’t showed up. Knock, knock.

Today I have only eaten five bananas, unlike yesterday’s eight, and nowehere near my record nine from the pacific crossing from Mexico. I am going to have to pick up the pace. Now the sun is setting over an empty horizon, and I have to watch it go.

From Alma:
All four sails are up and we are charging along. I read for a couple hours until I was called on deck to see the dolphins. There was only ever one at a time and they all had very blunt foreheads. That was cool. I can’t believe that we will probably be in Hawaii in about two and a half weeks! I’m excited.

Thursday, 11/29. 0200 hours Marquesas time
Day 3

Jason:
We’re going to miss the Marquesas.

We’re close reaching under single reefed main and working jib and are just in a groove. All day yesterday and all through the night, Debonair has just been charging along. There’s a forecast for a big swell from the North that could slow our progress, but it hasn’t materialized yet and we’re roaring along while we can.

Friday, 11/30
Day 4

Jason:
The Southeast trades are treating us well—good fair wind on our beam ever since we cleared Nuku Hiva, and we’re steadily sailing straight north along the 140th meridian west. This morning at 10am we were at 03 degrees 02 minutes south, and 139 degrees 40 minutes west and easing along at about five knots. In the last day or so the wind has breezed up to nearly 20 knots and has eased off to as low as about 10 knots. We’ve carried all sail, in the lighter wind—jib, staysail, main and mizzen, and have reduced sail to just double reefed main and jib in the heavier wind. Through all that we’ve kept our speed between five and six knots, with the occasional runs even faster.

We caught a good sized skipjack tuna yesterday. It’s maybe a bit bigger than we can manage, but we’ve dedicated ourselves to eating it. Arlo and JT marinated and baked some last night for dinner. This morning Arlo made a great poisson cru for breakfast. (Poisson cru, the raw fish, lime, onion, veggies and coconut milk specialty of French Polynesia, became a favorite for the fish eaters aboard. Like the locals, we enjoy it breakfast, lunch, and dinner.) We’ll have fish salad sandwiches for lunch. We think we’ll take a break from fish tonight, and will cook the rest of the fish tomorrow and plan on finishing it by Sunday. With all this fish, accompanied by papayas, mangoes, guavas and bananas, we feel like we’re really having a final Marquesan celebration.

Just this moment, the wind is light enough that the forward deck has dried. I’ll go see if I can putty the seam between house and deck where water is coming in and making Arlo & Alma’s forepeak a little swampy. It’s been so wet on deck lately that we couldn’t do the work, and so we’ve been taping up towels to keep the salt water from soaking everything. Every morning we hang the towels out to dry and replace them with dry towels. Between little projects like that, and the work of just keeping the boat going, and everything working right, the days fly by. We just finished our poisson cru and it’s almost time for skipjack salad sandwiches!

Windward Passage Notes

On Thursday, November 15 we headed out the south pass of Fakarava in the Tuamotu with friend JT aboard, bound for Nuku Hiva, back in the Marquesas. Although the weather window was not ideal, we needed to get moving again as Hawaii is beckoning and she’s 2400 nautical miles or so from the Marquesas, where we plan to re-fuel, take on water, do some final provisioning, and check out of French Polynesia. And anyway, sailors’ superstition has it that you never leave on a passage on a Friday, so we had to go.

We made landfall in Nuku Hiva two days ago, after a week at sea. We thought we’d been posting updates from that passage, but learned on arrival here that our blog was down. Here are those notes.

Weather permitting, we’ll leave next week for Hawaii. We hope to keep you posted along the way, and we’ll update photos at that point. As always, it’s lovely to think of you reading our words as we write. Thank you.

11/15 – Day 1

From the ship’s log: 0800 Departing Fakarava, bound toward the Marquesas.

11/16 – Day 2

From Alma: Happy one-third birthday Arlo, we’re going to the Marquesas! Day two, we’re heading to windward, so the forepeak [ed: where Alma and Arlo sleep] is uncomfortable. I’m a little sick of the pitching. If you’re not lying down, you feel sick in the forepeak. But other than that, things are going well (knock on wood). On deck it’s nice with the wind. We are headed for Nuku Hiva (New-koo heave-uh). It will be the third island that we have returned to. The first one was Toau (Tow-aaa-ooo) and the second one was Fakarava. I enjoy being able to picture what it will be like. And I think that I will enjoy returning to Nuku Hiva.

From Arlo: JT’s back. We are currently heading from the Tuamotu to the Marquesas, where we will pause briefly in Taiohae, Nuku Hiva and then continue on to Hawaii. So far it has been all upwind, which means forepeak hatch is shut, and pounding into the seas. But at least there is no rolling rail to rail. My sister and I have changed from our watch of 6-9am, to a morning watch of 5:30-8am, and I am also taking a solo 12:30-2 or 2:30pm watch. At least I get to fish again on passage, although I have not caught anything since the Great Barracuda in Apataki. Earlier during watch, I spent a lot of time using the exercise bands. These bands are great for passing the time on watch.

From Jason: After lunch. Arlo and Alma on watch and Alma singing and chatting. The aft cabin is a greenhouse. Here in the main saloon it’s cooler with the portlights open. Sailing to windward is work! It takes such patience. The boat is so much slower when we’re close hauled. All the sails are strapped in tight and we’re just slogging into a headsea. Each drop from the peak of one wave into the face of the next feels like it stops us. We fall off and everything feels heavy and inert until slowly, slowly we gain way again. When we’re moving again, we lurch off another wave, plow heavily into the next and are stopped again. Over and over, with a leaden feeling that makes me really feel the weight of the boat. And all this slow and slogging is all in the wrong direction! Will we travel half again as far as the rhum line course? So slow in the wrong direction. It takes a whole different mindset to have that kind of patience. You have to settle into the passage and really get into that passage making mode of just doing the best you can every moment to just keep her going, and not worrying about how long it will take. You have to take the long view. I’m getting there, but I’m not there yet. Just getting some miles behind us helps, but this windward work is so uncertain.

11/17 – Day 3

From Arlo: Fish! Fish fish fish fish fish fish fish! Today around midday I caught a good sized Skipjack Tuna. We cleaned it immediately and then marinated and baked it for dinner. It was delicious. In other news, this morning while washing dishes I spilled the entire tub of soapy water across the counter after a larger than usual swell. The weather has been mostly fair all day, except for two squalls of rain in the morning. We ran out of my favorite brand of sunscreen, so now I have to use the only other kind we have. We just fired up the engine again, because the wind just died. Just like we have been since we left Fakarava 2 ½ days ago: sailing when we can and steaming it when we can’t. With Nuku Hiva still four or more days out, we could use some favorable winds, not from dead ahead as they have been.

11/18 – Day 3

From Caitlin: The eastern sky is paler as dawn approaches. It’s taken a couple of days to get back into the rhythms of being at sea. First, the watch schedule starts to feel like a natural cycle: Jason hands DEBONAIR to me at sunset, JT takes her at midnight, Jason’s got the mid-watch, and I am on deck by 2:30am. Arlo and Alma take over at sunrise, and Arlo is on again after lunch to facilitate naps for the rest of us.

Then there are the daily rituals: the “noon report,” prepared by Arlo or Alma, is a highly anticipated accounting of miles covered and miles made good in the last 24 hours. Jason and I send for weather and update our strategy at 7am and 7pm. After dinner, in good weather, I read aloud to the whole crew. We’ve gotten through half a dozen books this way over the year—right now we’re reading The Last Navigator, by Stephen Thomas, about traditional Micronesian navigation. Sometimes it’s lighter fare.

The routines are kept interesting by the constant changing of weather and by the work to respond to that weather (genoa down, yankee up, yankee down, genoa up again, shake a reef in the main), by the maintenance work and galley chores. There are also moments each day that provide punctuation: the enormous ice crystal halo around a gibbous moon our second night out. Or yesterday afternoon, when I sat on the coach roof, leaning against the overturned dinghy and looked to windward in the perfect light of the late afternoon. Arlo and Alma and JT were working below on calculating wind speed based on the rotations of a Sprite bottle spinner the kids made. Jason was below too, replacing the water filter in our fresh water system. I only felt selfish for a moment as I watched the light on the water, on the varnished wood, on the sails, on my toes. And it seemed then that not only was this a perfect moment, but that this moment had another dimension, connecting me across years to each of the other late afternoons I have spent looking at the sea in the perfect wind and the perfect light. Those moments appeared to me all at once, unbidden: when I was six on my family’s first boat, when I was in high school mid-Atlantic, and on a schooner I worked on in my twenties.

My 3 a.m. watch this morning began under a clear sky. The moon had set already and the stars were extra bright. The milky way, which is easier to see in the southern hemisphere, glowed and Jason pointed out the “Magellanic Clouds” that are actually other galaxies. And then we sailed into squall after squall, some with wind, some with rain that came down so hard I could barely see the surface of the ocean. Some with both. By the time the sun came up, the squalls were moving past us and the clouds were shot through with rainbows in every direction.

I’m tired and also tired of going to weather. But I know how lucky I am.

From Jason: Today over lunch (Skipjack-salad sandwiches for the fisheaters) in the cockpit, Arlo gave the noon report. He told us that it was 14,300 feet deep. That’s 2.7 statute miles! (Or 2.4 nautical miles.) That’s a lot of water. We all thought about all that water down there. JT suggested picturing a column of water under DEBONAIR, 44 feet long and 12 feet wide and 14,300 feet tall and imagining all the life in that column. Mindboggling.

I’ve gotten into the upwind groove. It still takes way more work and attention than all the rolling downwind we did on our way here, but we’re keeping the boat moving in the right direction. I’ve acclimatized to the slower speed, and if we can keep her going four knots I feel OK. Five’s better, but four’ll do for now. I’ve relaxed enough to see the endless beauty of the sea all the way around us, and the sky above. The sea and sky are always changing, the sun playing through the clouds and over the water. Last night it was clear. Once the little waxing moon set, the stars were brilliant.

We’ve been out sailing all year—long enough to notice the slow movement of the constellations and planets across the sky. On our way South, from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus back in early July, just after sunset Mars was rising over the Eastern horizon, big and bright orange. It was so bright that I mistook it for the light of a ship until it rose higher and higher in the sky. Now, in mid-November, heading back to the Marquesas, Mars is right up overhead at first dark. The Southern Cross that used to stand vertical at sunset now rises on its left side in the wee hours after midnight, pivoting up a bit before disappearing at dawn. Just seeing the sea and sky, watching them constantly and continually and infinitely changing every day all year has been such a surprising pleasure for me.

11/19– Day 4

from ALMA: Home seems so far away, and it is. And yet our trip is almost over. Just over a month left. It is sad to leave this place, yet it is also nice to come home. As we get closer to leaving for Hawaii from these little towns on the French Polynesian Islands,, it is seeming crazier to come back to busy civilization

11/20—Day 6

From ARLO: 9:00 a.m. Fishing line deployed. Breakfast cooked. I made eggs, toast, and pamplemousse (pomelo). Yesterday we calculated the amount of water under us as we passed over a 16,400 foot deep spot. The amount of water under us was 3,837,600 cubic feet—although it would have been more if we had calculated it at our record depth of 18,040 feet deep.

This whole going to weather thing that we have been doing this passage definitely has its downsides, such as using the engine sometimes, and a couple of now-apparant leaks in the deck.

10:00 a.m. “Fish!” J.T. yells. I come up on deck and start heaving in the 300 lb test handline. The fish has been getting dragged through the water for a few minutes, but it still has plenty of fight in it. 90 seconds later we have a 3.5’ wahoo alongside. I had the leader in my hand while JT grabbed it and swung it aboard. Dad and I cleaned it and half an hour later we had four large plastic containers and one plastic bag in the fridge, packed with fish. Wahoo steaks for dinner tonight. And the next night and maybe the night after that too.

4:00p.m. (1600) My watch again. Dolphins sighted. They played under the bow, leaping from the water, the evening light making rainbows in the spray of their blowholes. All in all, not a bad day.

11/21—Day 7

We sighted Nuku Hiva around 0700. Spent the day trying to make easting in a confused sea. Around sunset, the seas calmed as we got cover under the southeastern point of the island. We ate lentil soup in the cockpit in the dark. Eventually Alma went below to read in her bunk and then sleep. Later that evening, we nosed our way into Taiohae harbor and anchored by the light of the almost full moon.

Chauncy Rucker

From Jason–

My father, Chauncy Rucker, taught me to sail when I was little. He was very big, and we had a small sloop which he loved sailing. I came to love it too.

My dad passed away earlier this week. He didn’t just teach me to sail of course. He taught me by example how to be a father and a husband and a loving man in the world. He was exceptionally good at all those things.

I’m looking forward to joining my mom and brother in Connecticut in a couple weeks. Right now, it’s good to be remembering Chauncy here in Taha’a with Caitlin, Alma and Arlo. Yesterday, walking a few hours way up over the ridge from Haamene Bay to Patio, we looked through the dense green over the bay where Debonair lay at anchor, and on out over the aqua reef to the ocean.

The view from the ridge
Taha’a, Society Islands

Looking out from that high vantage point I felt lucky. It’s a feeling I’ve had a lot these days—the good luck to be here, the great good luck of my mom and dad loving and supporting me all my life, and the continuation of that good luck in having Caitlin and these kids loving me here now.

When my father first pushed me off to sail on Mansfield Hollow by myself, I felt independent for the first time I remember. Parents have to push their children toward independence, while at the same time supporting us with a constancy of love. I’ve found it can be a hard balance to achieve, and my mom and dad nailed it. Pushing off on this voyage, I carry that great love with me. I know how lucky I am to be Chauncy Rucker’s son.

Thoughts on Generosity from the Island of Uo Pou

This is a longer post—we need to put it up before we leave the internet here, so we didn’t edit as much—enjoy!

Look for Arlo’s green shirt, and Alma’s pink one.

A couple of days ago, Arlo and Alma were invited by the president of the local and championship va’a (outrigger canoe) club to join a middle school paddling class. After class, which took place largely in with a twin-hulled canoe, Arlo and Alma got individual coaching from the master paddler in individual canoes. I expect Arlo or Alma will write more about the experience, as va’a (outrigger canoes in Marquesan) fever seems to have infected them, and they are already is talking about how to get outrigger canoes on the Oakland estuary when we return home. They’ve continued to paddle here at the school each day.

Rataro (right) coaches Arlo in the three phases of the paddle stroke (attack, propulsion and return).

What I can’t emphasize enough is the ubiquitous generosity we are benefiting from so often. The paddling coach was the man who founded the Ecole Va’a here in Uo Pou. The school—the only of its kind in the Marquesas, now serves 390 students a week and produces champion paddlers at the big competitions in Tahiti (which, by the way, the coach said Arlo had the making of). The coach is also, we learned, a renowned singer and performer and a nurse at the hospital’s maternity ward, as well as the nurse that accompanies patients on inter-island transports. And he took the time to coach each of our kids using a mixture of English, French and a lot of modeling.

I hope the pictures show how far beyond gifts of fruit this generosity goes—though we do continue to be grateful recipients of bags of pamplemousse and bunches of bananas. We return the generosity as we can—with gifts we brought for the purpose, invitations to our boat, and of course, our enthusiasm. It doesn’t always feel enough.

We are still figuring out the relationship between the Marquesians and the colonizing French culture. The world over the colonial relationship is complex, and there is necessarily tragedy, old and new. Here, we see a powerful indigenous culture, but we also feel a shadow of sadness from 150 years of colonization. As in so many colonized places, contact with Europeans, which began in a big way about three hundred years ago, decimated the Marquesan population, reducing the roughly 150,000 inhabitants to about 8,000. There are stone foundations, paths, bridges, and tikis in all the valleys, testifying to this once-booming population. My French is not nearly good enough to have a sense for whether this shadow sadness is more in my eyes or how much it colors the lives of Marquesians. We are aware always of this uncomfortable history, we are grateful to be here, we are learning what we can and we are giving as we are able.

In addition to enjoying the hospitality of the Marquesan people, we’ve met with generosity by sailors on other boats—cruisers, as we’re called. Almost all sailboats crossing the Pacific each year stop at the Isles Marquises. And for good reason. The Marquesas are the first possible stop after leaving Mexico (about 3,000 nautical miles), the Galapagos (a similar passage), or Panama (an impressive 4,000 miles). For a boat like ours, those passages range from about 3 weeks to 7 weeks spent at sea. I’ve heard it estimated that about 500 sailboats arrive in French Polynesia each year.

In such a remote place, there’s a sense of being in it together—maybe not so far from the ethos of farmers in remote areas who know that they are the only ones available to lend a hand to a neighbor. Cruisers here make friends quickly and help each other before we have become friends. American boats are in the minority here. We’ve shared food and drink with folks from Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Belgium, France, New Zealand, South Africa and England, as well as sailors from the Bay Area. We’ve been loaned tools and jerry cans and books and we’ve been given a relay switch for our engine starter, as well as star fruit and grapefruit. One new friend taught us how to use some open source navigation software, another swam over and introduced himself and dove on our fouled anchor with Jason. Of course, we’ve tried to be generous with our resources as well.

There are all kinds of things about cruising that are uncomfortable (stuffy heat, dirty hair), scary (squalls in the middle of the night after a boat anchors too near you), and annoying (endless flies, cash machines not working for days), but these have been dwarfed so far by all the good things that fill our days—the natural and the cultural. Our debt to those we meet along the way grows deeper, adding to the debt we have to all of you who sent us on our way with your help and love and letters and gifts.

Below Jason writes about the talent and generosity of two woodworkers we spent a morning with a couple weeks ago. Thanks for reading. We love hearing from you all!

From Jason:

When we first met Pori and Axel a couple weeks ago, they were working in a yard alongside the road, cutting a massive tree up into boxy chunks. Caitlin spoke with them in French, and Arlo & Alma and I tried to follow along. Pori, the boss, is broad shouldered and solid. Axel, Pori’s junior and employee is built like a sumo wrestler, bald headed and heavily tattooed. When they heard we were interested in wood and carving, they were excited to try to explain about the tree they were working on (locally called Temanu), the carving tradition, and their work. It was difficult to communicate, so we arranged to come visit them at their shop. Before we parted ways, Axel held a board down with his plastic sandalled foot, and cut a slab off for us. It made me nervous, but he’d obviously been handling a chainsaw his whole life, and he still has all his toes.

We found Pori and Axel in their shop this morning, overlooking the bay up the hill from town. Pori showed us the ukareres (the local varient of the ukulele—flatter and higher pitched and with double or triple strings at each of the four string sizes) he makes. He uses all kinds of local woods, the Temanu he’d been cutting when we met him, breadfruit wood, mango wood, and other deeply and beautifully grained and colorful woods from the hills around his house. The shop is a broad shed attached to his house, full of blocks of beautiful wood, with some nice stationary tools (a thickness planer, a bandsaw) and hand tools and power tools and a carpet of wood chips over the dirt floor. A shop I wouldn’t have noticed from the road held so much beautiful wood and work. When I showed Pori the spoon I was carving from the Temanu they gave us, his eyes lit up and he took it to show Axel, who was working in back of the shop on a large carving. Axel was pretty amused at the idea of a wooden spoon, and found it even funnier when we said I might make a knife to go with it. A wooden knife? He and Pori were supportive of the idea of hair sticks though.

I showed them the knife and gouge I use, and Axel sharpened them both, and at my invitation, tried them out on the spoon I was working on. While we talked with Pori, Axel hollowed the bowl of the spoon and shaped its back. We checked with him a few times and he demonstrated the way that he uses both of his hands to hold the work and control the blade. He has a two handed technique where he levers both of his thumbs against the handle and back of the blade to apply a lot of pressure with a lot of control. He makes it look quite simple, but I’m going to have to work to get the feel for it. He’s even more deft with small carving tools than he is with the chainsaw. His carvings, in the traditional Marquesan style, bowls and tikis, are busy with exceptionally fine detail. Their shapes are graceful and the elegance and perfection of the carving are amazing.

We went back and forth with Pori and Axel, talking about wood and carving and Ukareres. Pori played his ukarere–a little, faster and higher pitched than the Ukulele music we’re used to. We talked about tools some more with Axel. We looked at more of Axel’s carvings. I didn’t want the visit to end, but they had given us a couple hours of their time, carving lessons, sharper knives, and a lot of patience already. We let them get back to work, and wandered down the hill to town, wondering at our fortune in finding these two woodworking masters at random out alongside the road, and at connecting with people over shared passions.

Landfall (Sunday midday)

3rd Update from our Pacific Passage

Day 19

from Arlo–
Still no fish. About five days to go (knock on wood).
Today, we rigged the staysail on the main backstay. Worked great for downwind. The only issue with the nav program that Alma and I are making is that it does not work when your two positions are on opposite sides of the dateline, within 90 degrees to either side of the dateline, but we are working on it. We had pizza for dinner and the last of the equator (key lime) pie, which we made when we crossed the equator and the Southern Cross is clearly visible in the sky. I did my 6th half hour stationary run of the trip, and I am longing for a nice run on dry land. But, other than that, it’s great out here.

Day 21

from Alma—
This morning on . Arlo’s and my watch, it started to rain, so Arlo went down to get my rain jacket while I steered. (He already had his on.) While he was down below the wind and rain picked up. I was drenched and also scared. Then once Arlo came back up, I found out that he had been changing into a swimsuit while I was on deck alone and drenched. For the rest of the day, the only consistency was that the wind wasn’t constant. When the wind got really light, my mom started to make bread because we were motoring and it was so flat. (Our stove is hard to use in rough weather.) Then, the wind picked up so we sailed, but my mom was already making bread. So, it has been somewhat frustrating.

Day 22

from Caitlin–

The crazy French sailor Bernard Moitissier circumnavigated the globe alone in the early 70, as part of one of the first single-handed races. But when he approached England in the lead, he turned the boat around and kept on going—almost all the way around the world again. This has always confirmed for me that Moitissier really was crazy.

For me the point of a passage has always been to go somewhere, to get the passage over with and be somewhere. But we’re sailing through our 22nd day now, and I’ve been at sea longer than I ever have before, and while I’m very ready to step ashore, I’ve begun to understand, I think, why someone might want to keep sailing.

Time is slippery out here—the days and nights keep reeling off, unchecked by a full night’s sleep. The horizon always stays the same, no matter how far we sail, though the sea and the sky never look the same. Some days sea and sky are in black and white—so many shades of grey, then everything is blue the next day. Sky and sea can turn pink and red and orange with sunsets. And the sky at night is just as variable. It took me a week or two to get used to night watches, but now my favorite nights are moonless ones when the dome of the sky is so full of stars that it matches the phosphorescent sea.

It’s hard to believe we might be ashore in less than a week.

Day 23

From Alma–
This morning when I woke my dad up for breakfast, he had been dreaming, and so he said “Who is going ashore?” and I reminded him that we were at sea. We should get to the Marquesas in about three days, and at noon today we will have completed 23 days at sea. Arlo has been fishing a lot, and he keeps losing lures, and now it seems like a few have been being bitten off by a big fish or sharks.

Day 24

from Alma–
I have a weird rash. It’s just on my right side and only where sun hits me, so we think that it is from too much sun. Today we saw the top of the island that we are going to over the horizon. Tomorrow we will come in to port. I can’t wait. Arlo and I don’t need to stand watch in the morning because everyone will be on deck to see the island close up. I said that I wanted to sleep in, but that probably won’t happen since I have gotten used to waking up at about 6:00 in the morning.

Day 25

from Arlo–
Today we anchored in Atuona in Hiva Oa after sighting land at 5:50PM last night. The whole island is lush green, with soaring craggy mountains, sheer cliffs, and a friendly cruising community. We took our first showers since Manzanillo, after a passage of 25 days, 2 hours and 40 minutes. By anybody else’s standards, the showers were terrible, right next to the dumpster, shielded only by a shoulder height cinderblock wall, muddy floor, and no hot water. To us, it was paradise, and in the tropics, the cold water is a luxury.

When you have arrived in the Marquesas, you receive a startling realization that the Marquesas, which have always seemed so impossible and unreal to me, are just hunks of land in the water. Sure they have amazing mountains, and are tropical and lush, but our anchor lines still creak and people still use bathrooms and the Marquesas are not the fantasy that I knew was unreal, but could not expel from my mind.

From Caitlin & Jason–
And to us, when we arrived here in the Marquesas, we realize that these islands we have been dreaming of, that have always seemed less than real, are not only very real, as Arlo points out, but are also bigger, more vertical, more beautiful, more foreign, more everything than we imagined. We are amazed that we are actually here.

From Alma–
This morning when I woke up and came on deck, we could see Hiva Oa much more close by. At about noon we made landfall. We anchored once, but it is crowded in this anchorage, so everyone needs to set a bow and stern anchor, but there was one boat that refused (or couldn’t. We don’t know because they spoke fast French.) to set a stern anchor. This meant that we had to move or else they would hit us. So we moved to another spot in front of a blue boat that gave us bananas and grapefruit, which was good because we had just eaten our last apple. After that, we went ashore and took fresh water showers. It was awesome! It’s still hard to believe that we’re in French Polynesia.

still sailing

May 5, 2018.
Day 10–
from Caitlin
The endless rolling is getting to all of us. The noise of it, the way it keeps us from sleeping, that it keeps us from doing much besides what is necessary. Making dinner and doing dishes has become a contact sport. I have bandages on my thigh and elbow from burns I suffered when the hot oven launched its racks onto me. A dinner doesn’t pass when the contents of some bowl isn’t hurled across the cabin.

It’s easier to take on deck. We spend a lot of time watching the swells, the birds, and the not-as-rare-as-you’d-like pieces of plastic trash float by.

The windvane is steering and only requires occasional adjustment in these consistent northeast tradewinds, and we roll across the sea at seven knots day after day. The pilot charts suggest we should have a current with us here, and our progress across the chart is steady, but it’s become clear that we have a one knot current against us. Nonetheless, we’ll reach the ITCZ soon.

From Arlo:
Rain!! Glory Hallelujiah!! And one beautiful sunset. The whole sky and sea were pink then yellow, and a perfect double rainbow. I caught a mahi mahi on a trolling feather. The mahi mahi salad was good. I only consumed six bananas today, unlike yesterday’s eight. If we keep up this speed we have 13 ½ days left. Unfortunately our calculations show a one knot countercurrent. Shucks. Seven flying fish aboard during the night. Tossed them over because mom won’t let me fish until I finish the mahi mahi. I finished it today, so she will probably let me fish tomorrow or the day after. Oliver is helping me make a program on the calculator to tell me the distance between two lat/long positions. It will also tell me the course.

May 7, 2018
Day 12–
from Alma:
Two flying fish came aboard last night. Today, we opened gifts of origami paper and colored pens from our friends. I made cranes, balloons and penguins. This evening we sailed under our first rain since California. It came with wind too. When we did the calculations and if we kept up this speed, we will be in the Marquesas in 11 days.

from Arlo:
I am writing this in the middle of a squall. The wind has gone around a hundred degrees and picked up. It is raining and overcast, so I came down from on deck in my swimsuit to go to bed. We have covered 1420 nautical miles and have 1332 to go. Over halfway! Our calculations show us to have 11 days to go. We are officially in the ITCZ.

May 8, 2018
Day 13–
from Caitlin:
Jason called the squall last night a “magic portal.” In the final hour of daylight we were running at six knots, driven by the same tradewinds that had been powering us for nine days. Then a gust of cold wind, then hard rain, then the wind veered to the Southeast and suddenly we were beating to weather in a stiff breeze and cold rain.

We had seen the dark cloud of squall coming and we had gotten ready for a warm fresh water “shower” by changing into our swimsuits and bringing shampoo on deck. So there we were, in our swimsuits, teeth chattering for the first time in months as darkness descended. Eventually Oliver went below to do dishes and Arlo and Alma changed for bed. Within an hour the rain and wind let up, at the same time and quite suddenly. And then, for the first time in ten days, it was calm. We had passed through the squally door into the ITCZ. And here we are today—sometimes ghosting along under full sail. Sometimes motoring, looking for the rain to try for a shower again today.

May 9, 2018
Day 14–
from Arlo:
Today we got out of the ITCZ in which we got several rain showers, and caught enough water to wash our hair. Now we are roaring along on a port tack again. With 9.7 days to go, we will get there with a total of about 24 days hopefully. Today we made and launched a sardine tin boat. It had the metal bit on top strung behind it as a rudder and the lid peeled up as a square sail. We still have plenty of canned fish, so maybe we can launch some more of these. [Editor’s note: we keep all plastic aboard, but outside 25 nautical miles MARPOL law allows for the disposal of glass, metal and paper overboard.] My sister and I have been working on recreating “the Settlers of Catan” and we are almost finished.

May 11, 2018
Day 16–
from Caitlin:
Through the ITCZ! A squally night turned into a beautiful day. We are sailing hard enough on the wind that the port lights are shut and we are hot and sticky below. But on deck it is always beautiful, in whatever version the sky and sea are serving up at the moment. Nights, especially, have been awesome: phosphorescence deep in the water, stars all the way to the horizon, the milkiest milky way you’ve ever seen, and dolphins leaving phosphorescent trails.

from Jason:
The crescent moon is up above the Eastern horizon peeking in and out of clouds. The milky way is arcing from dead ahead, up straight over the top of us to the North. We’ll lose sight of the North Star soon in our steady progress South. Alma came on deck last night and looked at these new Southern stars with me. Arlo is sleeping in the cockpit tonight. It’s a little better tonight, but it’s been brutally muggy. Steamy. Close and damp. Oliver said that on his watch a flying fish landed on Arlo’s head (!) and flopped around while Oliver scrambled for it, and Arlo never woke up. I think Arlo will like that story.

The ITCZ, the doldrums, are feared and despised for their light fluky winds and sudden squalls. They’re also beautiful. The sky is crowded with clouds of all sorts, stretched out in the distance where you see the peaks of high cumulus clouds peeking up over the horizon. Those distant high clouds, sunk down low, and the patches of dark squally cloud that drape gray veils of rain down to the ocean make it feel like the sky has come right down to the ocean. As the sun crosses the sky, the light on the waves and clouds continually changes.

As beautiful as the doldrums are, our love for the tradewinds is understandable. The consistent Northeasterly breeze that drove us West and South for seven days felt endless, like the water and sky. This wind revolves clockwise around the entire North Pacific, unchecked by any landmass. The waves too. They roll round and round, uninterrupted, building into a bigger, cleaner form. It felt like we could have ridden that wind and those swells forever.

May 13, 2018
Day 17–
from Alma:
This morning I made rice pudding for breakfast with the left over rice from last night’s dinner. I threw a message in a bottle over. My second one! I threw it over just before lunch. Arlo went on another run in place. I did a lesson of math today, and more origami. Then later, my mom and I made bread. My mom also made oatmeal cakes to have for breakfast morning after next. Right now, my dad is taking apart the pump in the head (bathroom) to fix it. I can’t wait till the bread is done! I love homemade bread.

from Jason:
I don’t think I can tell the entire banana saga here. Through friendly negotiations in the Manzanillo marketplace, Caitlin procured two large bunches of bananas. I mean large. Each one was difficult for one person to carry. The crew come down the gangway, with someone on each end of each bright green bunch. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

We hung one bunch in the galley and another all the way up in the forepeak, hanging over the foot of Arlo’s bunk. Somehow Oliver had a recording of Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat song, and we played it and sang it as we worked. In our first days at sea, as the boat started really moving, we added rigging to try to stop the swaying of these huge masses of fruit. We eagerly waited for the bananas to ripen, adding banana backstays and shrouds, topping lifts and vangs to try to keep them from getting momentum. They’re delicate, and though they were green, they bruised if bonked. Finally, on the seventh night out, the bunch in the galley broke loose on its lower end and swung wildly with the roll of the boat, thrashing itself on the back of the settee. Oliver was on watch, and Alma was awake, and they re-secured the bananas and cleaned up the banana slush valiantly.

Oliver only had to give a few bananas a burial at sea, and ate a couple that were broken but not destroyed. He proclaimed them ready and the banana eating was on! We wagered on how many bananas there were in those two bunches. There were 220. Accounting for some loss of bananas, the five of us probably ate at least 180 bananas in nine days. Arlo led the charge, eating as many as nine in a day. We ate so many bananas that we learned, and classified the various stages of banana ripeness. The ripest, “dessert bananas” were so sickly sweet that eating one would put you off bananas for the rest of the day. Caitlin made a wonderful banana bread and Arlo made delicious banana pancakes to try to dilute the sweetness of those last bananas. There was little fanfare or sadness when the dried up final stalk was tossed overboard.

from Arlo:

Today is Mother’s Day, and Alma and I made mom a card.

Our latitude is zero degrees, 20 minutes North. This afternoon we are crossing the equator. Each moment I am farther South and West than I ever have been. My sister and mom are making key lime pie to celebrate, and I am going to toss over a message in a bottle as we cross the equator. It has our lat/long, an email, a date, and a message in it.

I had the idea of putting up both headsails at once and we are going a lot faster. We are about seven and a half days out from the Marquesas. I have not caught any fish since the mahi mahi, and I am convinced that there are no fish in this half of the ocean. Other than that, life has been great. We finished the bananas, and by the time we got down to the last couple dozen out of the 220 to begin with, they were too mushy for anything but being baked into pancakes. They were quite good that way.

May 14, 2018
Day 19–
from Jason:
This morning we’re broad reaching again, rolling downwind toward Hiva Oa. The South Pacific looks and feels just like the North Pacific on the other side of the equator of course, but it still feels like a milestone to have crossed the Equator yesterday. We were at 129 degrees and 42 minutes West at 1654 local time (UTC – 8). Arlo and Alma threw messages over in a bottle. Oliver threw another. Caitlin gave an offering of rum to Poseidon. I blew the Calavera shell we got in Manzanillo, and there we were. It was another typically lovely day in the trades, with the wind and waves and sky all going our way. From here the degrees South will tick back upward. The Southern stars will keep coming higher in the sky at night—Southern Cross, Centaurus, Scorpius, Sagitarius.

In addition to crossing the equator, yesterday our total miles sailed went over 2000 and it was mothers’ day. It was a good day. We ate dinner in the cockpit as usual, Caitlin read The Walkabouts as the sun went down, and we settled Debonair in for another steady night of tradewind sailing.

Jumping the Puddle

Thanks to our friend Mark for posting this update. For those of you who want to follow our progress, you can look up our position at noon today: 14* 04’ N, 118* 51’W.

What follows are a few unedited thoughts from Arlo, Alma, Caitlin and Jason:

Day 2

–Arlo
Left yesterday. Had a great sail all day. I stood my dawn watch this morning. Yesterday as the sun set, we saw a green flash. This morning the sunrise was great. We have been making 4-6 knots under sail, and 6-6.5 knots under engine. Currently the wind is down and we are motoring. The seas are all smooth. The windvane has been steering, and we have been sailing within 10-20 degrees of our course to the Marquesas, 240 degrees. I have a fish line out, but I have not caught anything. Pelagic fishing seems to be farther and fewer between. Just as my mom said it would be. Today we took sun sights with the sextant. The water is so deep and pure blue. I have never seen anything like it. We took a secci disk reading today and you could see the disk for 18 2/3 meters down! All in all it has been about as good a trip as you could hope for, and I was expecting a lot worse.

–Jason
Caitlin is braiding Alma’s hair to keep it from snarling. Oliver is doing the dinner dishes. Arlo is reading in his bunk. Caitlin and Alma are on deck with me. I’m on watch, just past sunset. We quit motoring just after dinner and are sailing on a light and fluky breeze. When it comes up and we go, it feels so good. It’s been lighter than we expected and certainly hoped these first days. It’s been beautiful though. The water is very clear. The sea is a bright, brilliant blue and the sky is pale in this humidity. We stay busy and the day pass quickly.

Day 3

–Arlo
Fluky winds. Watch was uneventful but good, and the sunrise can compare to the previous one. Yesterday, I caught a foot and a half long Mexican Bonito. It was quite good fried. I read the Old Man and the Sea from cover to cover (can you say that when you read it on Kindle?) in one hour. Water has just gotten bluer. You can see clear to over 90 feet deep. The depth around us is several thousand meters. We have come 310 miles and have 7,442 to go, in about 26 days. On the first day out, we retarded clocks one hour, so that the kids’ dawn watch was only dark for one hour. I have started the second volume of Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers. I am working on re-reading the whole series. None of our 220 bananas are ripe yet. Yesterday all five of us took out the exercise bands, and worked out on the foredeck. When the loud old engine is off, life is great.

–Caitlin
Sailors sometimes refer to the Pacific Ocean as “the puddle,” and right now that description feels apt. Today is the third day at sea, and though we’re still rolling across small swells there’s almost no wind—the sea surface has alternated these last few hours between glassy and riffled, and we’re all itching to sail again.

We left the harbor at Las Hadas, Manzanillo with no fanfare, no wavers or confetti throwers. That was just fine. It felt good to be slipping away finally after a couple of weeks of getting ready. Our friend Oliver flew in for the passage and got right to work helping with the preparations. In addition to the boat readiness projects, we took on about 70 gallons of water to top off our tanks, bought 220 green bananas (yes, we did just count them!), filled every seat in a taxi with provisions, took on additional diesel fuel, and filled an empty propane tank. Figuring out how to provision in a new town was a good challenge. Finding 12 dozen unwashed eggs was not hard, but where do you find a banana farmer to request two very long stems of bananas? How do you get onions with their skins intact, when every market in Manzanillo strips them? And not having tasted a particular brand of olives in a little baggy, do I really want to buy 20 baggies of them?

DEBONAIR was ready to go on Tuesday morning. On Monday Jason had visited half a dozen different offices in the big ship port of Manzanillo, trying to get us and our boat cleared out of Mexico. It had been a bit of a runaround—Jason described the varied reactions he got from security guards with machine guns when he showed up carrying a propane tank. But everyone was courteous and most were helpful and after we had all gone back to the immigration office that night at 7pm because they wanted to see our faces, we thought we’d be able to sail Tuesday after a quick trip to cancel a permit at the government bank in the morning. How wrong we were. It seems that we’re the first yacht to check out of the Port of Manzanillo in quite some time and they didn’t know how to treat us any differently than the container ships and tankers that they usually clear. So instead of heading out to sea Tuesday afternoon, we found ourselves tied up to a big concrete wharf under the Vessel Traffic Control offices, where we had an appointment for a customs inspection. The four men and one German Shepard that showed up to conduct the inspection didn’t quite know what to do on a boat as small as ours. And the dog had even less interest in going aboard a small rolling boat than a cat would want to dive into a pool.

We passed inspection and here we are a couple hundred miles of the coast of Mexico, heading west. Nights have been beautiful, days have been hot. If you haven’t been to sea, it’s easy to imagine that it’s boring. But we always find more to do than we have time for. Part of the reason for that is that we often need to sleep a bit during the day. There’s also always something to attend to on the boat—a sail to reef, a line to re-lead, chafe gear to install. And anything you do regularly at home—cooking, cleaning, personal care, washing dishes—can take twice as long on the boat. But there’s so much we want to do out here when we’re not taking care of business.

We’ve started taking sun sights and are trying to get good at working them. There’s exercise routines, reading, looking at weather forecasts, school work, art, little fix-it jobs, and watching the sunset, which we do as a whole crew in the evening. Already today, Alma and Arlo are working with Oliver to learn programming on a graphing calculator, I stitched up holes in various items of clothing this morning, Jason and Arlo made a fishing gaff out of a stick of bamboo and a very large fish hook, Arlo prepared the noon report, Jason stowed some gear, we poured endless buckets of water across the hot decks, and Arlo did a little washing up with a bucket of fresh water we kept on deck for the purpose. Now if only the wind would come up, we’d be sailing too.

I think we’re all enjoying the rhythm and routines that are emerging. Many of those routines will stay the same all the way across the Pacific—some will change as the weather and sea state changes. The blue-footed boobies are still with us, trying to land in our rig for a free ride. We’ll be too far offshore for them soon, I think. And I wonder which birds will replace them. We have so many miles to go.

Day 5

–Alma
This morning I made breakfast for the first time on this trip—I made oatmeal with cinnamon and dried cranberries. My favorite part of the day was when I threw over one of the three bottles I brought for messages in bottles. But the dolphins we saw in the afternoon were pretty good too!

Day 7

–Alma
This morning for breakfast my mom and I made pancakes and a brown sugar and lime juice syrup! Last night four flying fish landed on our boat. Today, Arlo put one of them on a hook and caught a fish! Arlo has also been desperate for a run, so today he ran in place on the side deck. I wish that we were there already. I don’t like waking up at 6:00 for watch. I don’t like making breakfast alone at sea. But there are things that I do like too, like the fact that we haven’t seen another ship since our second night. It’s amazing to think about and hard to keep yourself looking for ships on watch.

–Arlo
Today I caught a skipjack Tuna. I had four flying fish come on board last night, and so I put one on a hook and trolled it at five knots. We got him aboard, and he was so colorful. By the time we were half way done filleting him, all the color was gone. He was about two or two and a half feet long, and when we baked him up at dinner with some potatoes. . . damn. This evening the wind has picked up a bit and we were doing seven knots. Last night at the same time we clocked nine knots. Yesterday, I lost some lures overboard when we rolled and they slid off the aft seat. So very, very, sad. I talked to Granma Nancy yesterday, 600 miles off shore. We are almost 700 miles offshore now. Today I went on a “run”: 30 minutes of jogging in place on the side deck while holding on. It may not sound great, but it’s pretty good cardiovascular exercise, and about all that you could hope for in that neighborhood on a boast.

Day 8

–Jason
Rolling, heaving, pitching, swaying, surging, yawing. Coming up on two straight days of sailing and no engine time. It feels so good. Tonight, Alma and I swapped out jibs again just after sunset in the new dark. A & A really know the boat now, and Alma knows her way around the foredeck. She handled halyards and I tackled as we took in the big jib and then she handled sheets while I hauled the halyard as we set the working jib, the bow rolling sweetly and the bow waving shushing. Last night the dolphins joined us. Tonight there was phosphorescence in the bow wave. As we surged and plunged, lights rolled out in the froth like stars in the sea.

Day 9

–Alma
No flying fish came aboard last night. Every day we make note of how many miles we have come from noon to noon. Today we broke our record and did 144 nautical miles! Last night, a lot of our bananas mushed from being rocked so much. We took the mushy ones to make banana bread.

— Caitlin
We hit the trade winds a couple of days ago and have been scooting along ever since, often going 7 or 8 knots under mizzen and yankee jib alone through the days and nights. Today at noon Arlo plotted our position and announced we’d made good almost 150 miles—a vast improvement over our first few windless days.

It’s odd that it’s not lonely, but I think very few sailors feel lonely at sea. To start with, there are five of us living in a 40’ space. But also the sea, the sky, and Debonair herself are dynamic, always changing, and it’s hard not to think of ourselves as in conversation with those forces. The brown-footed boobies and red footed boobies are still with us, and now tropic birds are making an appearance. They all seem to stay near us—some of the hundreds of flying fish we scare out of the water become their dinner. And, of course, dolphins visit most days and many nights.

The fresh food should be largely gone by the end of next week, though we’ll have cabbages and onions to the end, I hope. After a bananadventure last night involving some mashed bananas that were given a fitting burial over the stern of the boat, we’ve opened the banana season—we should be in bananas for a couple of weeks, if they don’t ripen too fast.

Arlo prepared our noon report and predicted 16 more days until the Marquesas. We’ll see what lies ahead.

Update from Barra de Navidad

–from Caitlin + Jason

We’re writing and posting this one from a cell phone, and we can’t figure out how to move the pictures to place them where they make the most sense. So they’re mostly clustered at the end. Please forgive/enjoy the randomness.

The 150 miles of coastline south from La Cruz in the Puerto Vallarta area to Bahia Manzanillo, where we will anchor in a few days, has more harbors than the entire 850 mile coast of Baja, and we’ve slowed down to enjoy them. Another reason we’re moving slowly is that there hasn’t been much wind. The forecast, predictable for this time of year here, is so often for light and variable winds.

All these days at anchor have been busy.

Caitlin & Alma repair a sail cover at anchor. Alma is doing most of the work, turning the handle on the hand-cranked sewing machine.

In addition to working on the boat—this is endless and there’s a long list of jobs to check off before we jump across the Pacific—we’ve been in the water, both intentionally (snorkeling) and unintentionally (flipping the dinghy in a botched surf landing), doing school work, kayaking, exploring a mangrove estuary (we rowed by a small crocodile!), eating at beachside palapa restaurants, fishing, cooking, visiting with other cruising boats, and swimming some more.

Tonight we are anchored in the shallow lagoon at Barra de Navidad. This is a domestic tourist destination, and the beaches and streets are packed with families from all over Mexico enjoying the santa semana. We joined the crowd ashore today. Tomorrow we’ll stay on the boat to celebrate Easter by painting the mizzen mast and sailing the dinghy.

We had a bit of a change of plans earlier this month, shortly after we last wrote. The three or four days we meant to spend reprovisioning and working on the boat dockside in La Cruz turned into ten days when Jason landed in a hospital for surgery

to repair a hernia. Tuesday night he became aware of the issue, Wednesday morning he popped into a little farmacia to speak with a doctor, and by Wednesday afternoon, we had taken the bus to a hospital in Puerto Vallarta, where Jason was admitted

for surgery the following morning. There was no emergency, and we could only imagine how long the series of appointments and office visits would have taken to get the same surgery in the United States.

Jason’s surgeon seemed to run the hospital, and with his jeans, and shirt open under his blazer, he looked more like a Hollywood producer than a gastroenterologist. But Jason fared well under his care and is, just over two weeks later, all but back to full strength. It turns out Mexican hospitals do not, unfortunately, serve carne asada tacos.

To pass the time while Jason recovered, we rented a car and spent a couple of days in the mountains above Bahia Banderas. It was good to leave the heat of the coast and we loved the beautiful town of San Sebastian, where we stayed in a 300-year old adobe home and walked along ancient sunken stone paths through the pine forest. Getting to the top of the mountain above San Sebastian was more than our little sedan could take—the steep cobbled roads wound up and down improbably—and we gave up, likely just before the top.

Though we enjoyed the mountain excursion, the town of La Cruz, and new friends on other boats at the marina, we were relieved, finally, to take in our dock lines and to be on our way again. The sailing has been gentle, though sometimes through water stained a shocking deep red by plankton. We had read about a red tide but none of us had seen one. The ocean truly looks like its bleeding, and it leaves us feeling uneasy. But then the water is suddenly blue again. Or the light turquoise of water over sand

We’ll try not to post too many pictures of dolphins, but look at this guy.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll see friends and—mostly—work to prepare the boat for the 3,000 mile passage to the Marquesas. During the passage and during the six months we are in French Polynesia, we’ll be less frequently connected to the internet. Our friend Mark has kindly agreed to post messages to the blog as we are able to send them to him, though there will have to be fewer pictures. Whenever we do get internet we’ll look forward to hearing from you—in messages on the blog or by email.

Tomorrow we’ll find out if the Easter Bunny can find us on Debonair.