Approaching 1/2 Way
Today we will cross the 1/2 way point on our journey to Hiva Oa, which is only the first leg of Bill and Sharon’s adventure to cross the entire Pacific Ocean. Amazing! It’s 6:43AM and I am sitting in the cockpit enjoying a great zen like moment.
Bill raised he head from below and I objected to his appearance while I am still on duty. He obligingly went back to the racks. I get his desire to stick his head up. We are doing about 9 knots, steady wind and 1.5 meter waves. Glorious!
Bill mentioned our unexpected dinner guest last night. We have commented that every evening about dinner time, usually a pair of frigate birds come and check us out, circling the boat. We have speculated that they are expecting a fishing boat and hoping for a free lunch. Earlier yesterday (before our evening guest), one of them decided we were an aircraft carrier.
As I write this two more are circling the boat. The look whiter, like a Pacific Seagull I think. There are an amazing number of them out here, a long way from everywhere. Sometimes we see them in the water just bobbing along, usually in flight, but it seems a day does not go but without some appearing.
We always comment how hard it is to convey the feeling of the waves – pictures just never capture it fully. I hope this video gives some idea. For some people the sound and the wave action are soporific. Sharon went down yesterday for a quick nap and 2 hours later rose from the lullaby state. My Nancy is the same on our boat, and can go up to the forward cabin and sleep through anything.
Today looks like another 24 hours of just this – great winds and a fixed course of about 200 pointing us very close to our destination. The winds behind us are expected to strengthen so we may need to put a reef in the main tonight, and the waves are expected to continue to grow up to 2 to 3 meters.
As you may have noticed from the video, the action of the boat is in every direction as we go up and down the waves and slide from side to side. Something is always banging and crashing and until you get used to it you’d swear pieces were being torn off the boat. There is an old sating – “One hand for the yourself and one for the ship”. Even walking the 15 feet across the main salon to take a coffee from the galley to the navigation station/desk, you need to keep a hand on a counter or table.
Only because I feel it necessary to always include some boring stuff in my posts, I wanted to touch on “how far can I see at sea?”. You can’t help but wonder how these birds keep finding us – it is a big ocean after all. Assuming there are no members of the growing Flat Earth Society, we all know that the earth curves and about every 5 kilometers/2.5nm it drops by about 2 meters.
As I sit hear in the cockpit of Turtlebones, my eyes are about 2 meters above the water. When we drop down to the bottom of a wave, when I see waves in the distance that are just above the horizon they are about 2 meters high. There are a few at this time, but not many. I expect by this time tomorrow it will be a different story.
Yesterday(?) when we mentioned we did the VHF radio check we mentioned that it was “line of site”, so if the mast is 70 to 80 feet off the water, it’s horizon would be about 10nm miles away, but the boat we are talking with would also have their antenna up high, hence our estimated 20nm.
The other thing I think about as I look out on the waves is when we talk about “person overboard” drills. It is one thing to worry about them becoming hard to see from the waves as they dip up and down, but if our horizon from inside the boat is about 3nm if we were standing and looking, it means we need to be close enough to where they went in the water that we could see the light on their life jacket. If we are not aware right away they went in, we need to try and backtrack on our exact course to hopefully be within the distance we need to see them.
The seagulls of course have a birds eye view, but even so they can only see the 10 to 15nm. At night when we eat dinner (and have the lights on for cooking as it is often dark), we would stand out as an anomaly on this big body of water. So even if it is a 10nm view, pi x radius^2 says that any bird within 300 square miles will see us. If we are interesting enough for a quick flyby, that is up to them. Hopefully no more will crash during their passage!
Bill is back up and walking the deck to pick off the squid (2 so far). I will mention on other housekeeping notes that we ran the water maker again yesterday while also running the generator and we hit 70psi and close to full production. I hope today we will have mostly refilled the port water tank. It is a little too bumpy to be in the engine room trying to work so we will leave the check of the membrane until we move into lighter winds on the 18th. Bill did test the water and is still standing today so we think all is good regardless!
