Monday’s deep thoughts

We continued to find evidence of an intruder onboard over the course of the day, with eggs found in dishes, by the nav station and more. Bill fessed up that he was passionate about dark chocolate (or Sharon squealed on him, can’t remember which), and I did notice that many of the eggs that I saw but did not collect disappeared shortly after Bill entered the area.

The highlight was when Sharon magically found some dark chocolate “birds”. I will admit that although I have adapted (flexed) well as a vegetarian to meat consumption on Turtlebones, I was flinching as I had to bite the head of the bird!

Not every meal onboard is meat based. For lunch Bill and Sharon made crepes filled with banana, pear and mango and a covering of Chantilly Cream (sweetened goat cheese I was told). Amazing. We often joke about a friend of Bill and Sharon on the docks back in Puerta Vallarta (a vegetarian), who confessed that when he was on passages, cooking was too much of an effort so he gobbled down raw vegetarian hotdogs. I will admit I am happy being the victim of the creations of two excellent non-veg cooks! Tonight/today will be another special treat as when Sharon was on watch last night she put together the makings for home made bread which I can see rising in a bowl on the counter. I know I have never smelled home baked bread on a boat underway before! Can’t wait.

Yesterday I told you a bit about the trials of making an early morning coffee because of the energy and stove. This morning I went straight to the propane stove, boiled my water and sit here coffee in hand. The only issue was that first sip, that tasked of brine/salt. Not the coffee itself but the cup I was drinking from. So today you will hear more than you ever wanted to know about water onboard.

As you may have heard, the day before departure we “un-pickled the water maker”. This is a machine that sucks seawater in and runs it through a membrane system using a “Clarke pump” to create drinking water. When not in use for more than a couple days you need to “pickle it” in a solution to keep the membrane in good shape. Turtlebones’ water maker had not been used since 2021 when Greg and I joined Bill brining her up from Costa Rica.

You cannot use the system in a harbour as there is too much grunge, so Bill had purchased a backup membrane and a backup Clarke pump in case something went wrong – which of course it always does. It is a boat after all. Unfortunately what was broken was one of two water pumps that pushes the seawater into the Clarke pump. Bill of course also had a backup water pump which, after buying some fittings in the marine store in Puerta Vallarta and at Home Depot, we installed. But the water maker still did not work (we could not get the combined pressure of the 2 pumps up to 60 psi).

Determined not to delay any longer, Sharon purchased several additional jugs of water as backup, we filled both water tanks, and determined we would sort the issue out underway. If unsuccessful we would still be OK based on the extra water. Usually when underway the water maker is run each day or two and adds in the missing gallons of water to the water tanks. No such luck so far.

So what do you use water for? Pretty much everything – coffee, cooking, washing dishes, washing yourself, flushing the toilets/heads. So we have been very frugal with the water.

• We wash dishes with salt water using a foot pump. Sometimes we rinse in fresh but not always (hence the taste of brine with my cup)
• We sponge bath every few days, and yesterday I managed to wash my hair with about 1.5 cups of water in the sink. We are still speculating how Sharon will pull this off with her hair!
• Bill and I are relegated to peeing over the stern, downwind rail. Truth is we would likely do so anyway as it is a boy thing. 80% of drownings at sea are men and common reasons are they are less likely to wear life jackets and are often “under the influence”. I can’t find the stats but I have heard they often have their pants zipper down when recovered. Just to be clear, Bill and I don a life jacket and attach a safety line to the stern rail when we pee at night. Further, there is “no influence” in use, just water and iced tea.

I could go on, but suffice to say if it is a quiet day it is likely time to crawl into the engine compartment where the water maker is and try and get this functional again!

A quick switch of topic is that the night sky is just glorious (seen best while peeing). Usually I am amazed by how good iPhones are at photos, but I need to say it is always frustrating to take a night sky picture to try and capture the beauty. You will just have to take my word for it.

Some thoughts on our progress. First an apology that we have been having real challenges making the tracking system put the dots of out position in the right places. This happens when you press the button on the turtlebones.ca website.

If you are just getting the blog posts as an email you would never see this.

Anyway back to the point, we are currently about 730nm offshore and are 2087nm from Hiva Oa (as the seagull flies). We will continue South Westerly, maybe zig-zagging to keep more sun on the solar panels, maybe more direct if Bill decides to fly the Spinnaker. Notice in the map above, I am showing when we reach the transition zone, and it sucks. Most models are now showing between 2 and 3 days of motoring. We say we will motor if the winds only allow us to make 3 knots or less. We should be at Hiva Oa about Apr 25th.

I noticed last night we passed by a shallow area, it was only 1,119 feet deep. We returned to the more expected 11,700 feet deep quickly and we expect to remain in between 11,000 and 13,000 feet until we reach the Marquesas. As a point of comparison the Mariana Tench is about 36,000 feet deep, so we are in a relatively shallow part of the Pacific.

Sorry for the random order of these observations – an early morning stream of consciousness. I wanted to touch on the topic of garbage. As you can guess, we cannot take anything “out to the bin” – it is with us until Hiva Oa and a marine facility that allows us to offload. Organics can go off the back and Bill is a master at folding plastic bags or jamming plastic into a bottle to minimize volume.

Last night at dinner (a great soup dish), I had asked if anyone knew where the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is, as I wondered if we would pass by it. I have had images of Sir David Attenborough in my mind, planting a flag on the patch so that action could be taken without a worldwide consensus. Bill observed that it was hard picture the winds and currents allowing such a concentrations – an urban myth? So I did some digging and found the greatest concentration is between California and Hawaii, but there are 5 patches in the middle of ocean gyres.

The majority of plastics are micro-plastics less than the size of a pencil eraser, so you can sail through and not even notice.

When you are out here and see nothing but what looks like pristine water in every direction, it is hard sometimes to believe the impact even 8 billion humans can have. The good news is Turtlebones is not adding to the mess, and lets hope our politicians back home can ignore the lobbying of plastics manufacturers and we can start cleaning up our mess!

So that is it for my Monday AM update. As described above when talking about water issues, when on a boat shit happens (lets just hope it is not in a bucket). We can’t stop all problems, we can only deal with them to the best of our abilities and adapt as required.

What will today have in store?