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.