Monthly Archives: April 2015

It’s two hours into my night watch and I’m tucked into the corner of the cockpit, watching a light on the horizon to the right that may be a ship. There are low clouds over there that make the light appear and reappear as we ghost along at 3 knots under 5 knots of breeze. I’ve checked the AIS and there’s no ship showing, but it could be a fishing boat or even a yacht that doesn’t have an AIS transceiver so I pick up the binoculars and try to focus on the light, difficult to do as we roll with the South Pacific swell on our beam. I can’t quite make it out. 

To set my mind at ease I turn on the radar and as the scanner warms up I reach into the trug we use on passages to hold our inflatable lifevests and tethers while we’re not wearing them and feel for the big Ziploc bag of pretzel rods. It’s been four hours since dinner and a snack would hit the spot. When the radar’s up the scanner shows nothing, no ships, no squalls, nothing but the bit of sea clutter always right around us. I check the various distances to confirm there’s nothing, then turn off the scanner to preserve power and settle back in to my cozy corner with two pretzel rods and my book. After two or three pages I put the book down and just stare at the black night sky dense with stars. Jack likes moonlit nights but I love the new moon, when I can take in the planetarium-perfect bowl of twinkling heaven and make wishes on falling stars. 

I keep my eye on the light I thought was a ship. After a while it disappears below the horizon and I conclude it was a star setting along with Venus in the western sky. Jupiter shines above me and the Southern Cross is now visible again to the southeast. On these calm starry nights I find an hour can go by with my mind completely blank except for the odd thought about this constellation or that. This is remarkable because I usually have a very busy mind, always planning, listing, analyzing, what-if-ing various scenarios. Watching the night sky alone in a small boat in the middle of the ocean is meditation and makes me feel as calm and peaceful as I’ve ever been. 

The alarm on my iPhone goes off, appropriately named Stargaze, and even though there’s been no change in sound or motion that may indicate the boat needs attention, I reluctantly rouse myself from my comfortable corner and lean over the side deck to look forward for ships, then check the other side. I climb up to the helm and check our course, flip on the light that illuminates the sails and check their position and all the lines I can see to make sure everything’s as it should be. All is well and I tuck back into my nook and reset the alarm in case I should doze off. 

The rest of my watch passes like this, listening to the sounds of a sailboat underway, the water rushing by, the creak of the wheel as the autopilot steers our course, the mainsail softly undulating an S-curve above me in the light air, and I watch the night sky as ocean voyagers have for thousands of years before me. I feel a kinship with Cook and Bligh and all the legendary explorers, as well as our friends who crossed this ocean last year while we had to turn back after we lost our rig. 

I’m surprised when Jack appears to take over, so lost in the moment am I. It’s 1 am and time for me to go to bed. Jack will have a late rising moon on his watch, but I’ll be fast asleep.

Marce, noticing Jack looking bored: “Why don’t you write a blog post?” 

Jack: “I wrote one yesterday.”

(Pause)

Jack: “I’m not Elvis Costello, you know.”

For the sailors reading, we offer this explanation of why we can’t get this 18 ton boat moving in the right direction. This is pretty much the picture of our wind for the past few weeks, although the direction changes, sometimes by the minute. Of course this doesn’t tell the whole story because we’ve also had constant contrary currents to contend with and a nasty seastate. 

We left El Salvador with a clean bottom and a good plan for crossing the Intertropical Convergence Zone but the zone undulates like the Gulfstream and we could not get clear of it. Luckily, today we have wind and it’s even in a good direction and we are finally moving away from the doldrums and toward our destination. Thanks to everyone for whistling, praying, untying knots, doing the hokey pokey and whatever else you’ve done to call up the wind gods and get us moving.

The latest GRIB maps assured us that as bad as the dead calms have been, it’s due to get worse. As you Escapees know we’ve been clawing our way south towards the southern trade winds. Last week we finally crossed over one degree south and celebrated with a major treat, a two pound bag of Kettle wavy chips with sea salt that we’ve been hoarding since our last provisioning trip to Super Selectos in San Salvador. Boy howdy, do we know how to have big fun on EV?

As I say we crossed over one degree south latitude only to drift back north over it during the dead calm of night. These swirling currents in the Pacific are wicked and they’re even stronger to the west of us but, true to form, any breeze we’re getting is out of the south, which makes that difficult too. During the following day we played the puffs like a dinghy sailor and managed to get back over one degree south but tomorrow promises to be even deader than dead.

We decided that if we’re drifting tomorrow I’ll do my best to get rid of as many of these damn pesky trumpet thingies that stick out two and a half inches all over EV’s bottom, as I can. It’s one thing to have no wind. It’s another thing to have a 300 mile wall of NE currents pushing you backwards, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a few thousand trumpet thingies drag me down. No sir, not Yours Truly.

So it’s back into the briny deep for the handy bloke. Marce reassures me that the bottom of the ocean will be only four miles below and with my harness attached to EV, even with the sails dropped, if a squall should pop up I’ll just be dragged behind. I am not amused, and as I jump in I say that anything over six feet one inch is irrelevant, but we know better. I attack the buggers with a vengeance and soon, quiet with my own thoughts, I imagine what must a shark think, lurking in the deep, when he notices a smorgasbord of flora and fauna slowly drifting down from above? As I gaze down into the near as dammit bottomless depths, sun rays sparkle off the hors d’oeuvres as they float downward. I resolve to hurry it up.

Back aboard I notice that we’d drifted back north over the one degree mark again but I feel the stirrings of a breeze. Could this possibly be the wind? No. It’s a train of squalls as far as the eye can see so one can only conclude that the ITCZ has drifted south of us, and even though we’d crossed the zone at a fairly narrow point, apparently it moves around quite a bit. As our good friends on Macushla say, “it’s a sod and a bugger but there it is.”

Squalls yes, but they have wind, right? Close enough for me. One after another all night long, in an endless train of fifteen to eighteen knot bursts with heavy rain in steep nasty seas, but finally we were sailing. By midnight Marce had had enough and I took over, adjusting the course as each squall overtook us, then back again as the wind dropped back down to our usual four knots. Up and down. We were already double reefed with a jib and it got to the point that I didn’t feel the need to follow each approaching squall on our radar so I put it on standby and hung on.

I don’t know about keeping calm but we are definitely carrying on.

Jack, from the cockpit: Hey, you should see this cloud! Big naked woman with her butt sticking out. 

Marce, inside, feet up, reading: Huh. 

Jack: Seriously. She’s got her arm behind her heard, hair piled up, butt sticking out. 

Marce: OK. Jack: Gimme a camera. Marce points to the camera on the table. 

Jack walks over to get it. Jack, picking up the camera: First sign of the skipper cracking up. 

Marce, still reading: It’s not the first. 

Jack goes back out to the cockpit and shoots. 

Jack, looking at the picture: It’s not so realistic in the photo. 

Marce: Huh.

The day awoke to a startling scene. It was the sun rising above the clouds on the horizon. It’s been two days since we’ve seen it, a moment without rain or enough wind to actually sail. Several times I’d noticed, while ghosting along at a half a knot in large lumpy seas, Uncle Ray, our tireless auto pilot has a bright green vector line showing our course over the ground pointing north east while we are “sailing” south west. Time to crank up the Volvo…again.

Ten minutes later a squall with twelve knots of wind would come through so it’s back to the fire drill, head up into the wind, raise the main, fall off the wind, set preventers, and switch off the engine only to watch the wind drop to nothing. Reverse fire drill. This isn’t what I paid for and we can’t keep running the engine but we can’t let the effing currents push us back up to the equator. We had a carefully laid out plan to use the currents when we started but these Pacific currents seem to change hourly. I can’t understand how the currents in a three hundred square mile area of windless ocean could be totally against us. As I write this we have nine kts of wind which is a miracle but we can only do 2-3 knots speed over ground on a broad reach into these currents and perhaps dragging around every damn trumpet mollusk in the Pacific. The stress aboard Escape Velocity is written on Marce’s face. Not much to do but keep calm and carry on.

Fifteen knots from the east would be a start though.

It’s my night watch, and until about an hour ago we were making about 1 kt. in 4-5 kts. of wind. Then I saw that our course readout was kerflooey. Get this. The boat is pointed on a course southwest, but our track shows us moving northeast at half a knot. We hit another adverse current. There’s nothing we can do about it, short of firing up an engine and burning more of our limited fuel. I’m going to sit tight and wait for change of watch in an hour and discuss with Jack what to do. In one hour we’re only losing a half mile of hard won territory and sleep is more important as long as the boat’s fine. Do you believe this passage? 

Looking ahead we have another few DAYS of calms, an area of hundreds of miles that we can’t possibly motor through. We can see that there’s wind enough to move us in the right direction 200 miles further south of us but we can’t get there. Our precious time in French Polynesia is ticking away while we wallow here in the doldrums. Later: When Jack came on watch he decided to motor. We dropped the mainsail, sheeted in the jib and fired up the engine. I went off watch and when I woke up six hours later we are still motoring, the wind and current haven’t improved and won’t for the next four days. We are stuck in the Twilight Zone. If we continue to motor we run the risk of running out of fuel. If we do’t motor, the current will sweep us back over the equator and northeast. Mood onboard is glum.

Our wind died again overnight and by morning we were barely making 1.5 kts in about 4 kts of wind. And it’s not even in the direction we want to go. But sailing teaches you patience and we just have to make the best of it and wait for better conditions. We got an email from our friends who are sailing from Panama to the Galapagos and they are also experiencing light winds and a slow passage. I made apple cinnamon pancakes for breakfast and we sat in the cockpit enjoying the nice weather. Then we got out the sewing tools again — two pairs of pliers — and stitched another couple of feet of our blown-out cockpit window. It’s slow going and very hard on the hands but we sat on either side and passed the needle back and forth through the many layers of heavy vinyl until our hands cramped up. Another day ought to do it. We rewarded ourselves with a passionfruit and banana smoothie, and then the wind really died. Since we need to charge the batteries anyway we fired up the port engine and pointed EV south because even a few miles will help. But the engine, which we thought we had fixed back in El Salvador, is once again unable to sustain our usual cruising RPMs. It goes up and down every few minutes and sounds a little sickly. So it’ll be back to the starting block on that one as soon as we get to civilization.

Meanwhile, a few days ago we snagged a line on the starboard propellor and since we were sailing well at the time we put that problem on the back burner. Now with the port engine working but not as reliable as we’d like, we need to make sure the other engine is tiptop. We have no wind, the seas are calm, no time like the present. We put the port engine in neutral and waited for the boat to stop. Jack suited up in mask and flippers, we tethered him to the boat and he jumped in. I had an emergency heaving line on deck, too, in case he got detached from the boat. You don’t want to go losing your husband in mid-ocean. Jack figured out how the line was caught and dove again and again to cut the line away. A dozen dorado instantly swam over to check out the old fart in the yellow fins. And no, we didn’t catch any. So we have one good engine and one pretty good engine. What we need right now is wind, so all together now, send wind! Not too much, though. Let’s specify a steady 12-15 kts from the southeast, ok?

We’re as far from land as we probably will ever be. We’re 1500 miles from French Polynesia, 1400 miles from the coast of Mexico, 1600 miles from the Galapagos. I like to think we’re on the homestretch.

Sailing to the Marquesas from El Salvador is different from leaving from the Galapagos. In the Galapagos you’re already below the equator and the only decision to make is how far south do you sail to maximize favorable winds and minimize unfavorable sea state and ocean currents. Basically it’s west all the way. From El Salvador, and for the dozens of boats that make the crossing from Mexico each year, there’s the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the northern trade winds meet the southern trade winds and everything gets all confused, the seas, the currents and the wind. Complicating matters is that the ITCZ undulates like the jetstream and it’s nearly impossible to plan where to cross it. We’d been trying to catch up to the Mexico boats thinking we’d follow their strategy and cross the ITCZ very far west where historically the band of confusion is the narrowest. The problem with that for us was that we didn’t have enough wind to keep us going at a normal sailing pace and we were starting to think that it would be well into May before we make landfall. We ordered up a fresh round of wind and current reports and decided on the spur of the moment that we would turn south from where we were and ride what looked like a favorable wind to carry us over the axis of the ITCZ. It could go either way but what could be worse?

It turned out great for the first two days as we made our way south. EV romped along, happy to be out of the barn and making headway. Then on Wednesday night the seas started building and hitting us on the beam making life unpleasant aboard so we altered course to keep the swell behind us, pushing us more west than south but still towards our destination. Thursday night towards the end of my watch we got hit with the first squall. Then another, and another. Neither Jack nor I got much sleep as we stood by and monitored the boat and the weather. We didn’t have much canvas up and EV handled everything beautifully but it was still hard on crew’s nerves, maybe because of losing the rig last year, maybe because this is our first ocean passage since then and we’re just out of practice.

Each time the wind and seas moderated a little we turned our course as much south as we could stand, and when the wind kicked up again we turned back downwind to ride it out and keep the seas from hitting us broadside. This went on all night and all day Friday. Gradually we got to appreciate how well EV handles everything and we started to relax, but still, we needed to get south past this band of squalls that was sitting stationary along a line just below 4 degrees north latitude. The relentless wind on our beam took out one of the windows in our cockpit enclosure. Luckily it’s just the stitching that gave out and not the vinyl so we’ll be able to sew it up when the conditions improve and it stops raining.

Finally Friday evening the wind started to abate as we crept further south and by about nine o’clock I could tell we were past the axis of squalls. The seas were still up but I turned EV as much as possible south. I knew from our weather reports that we’re going to lose our wind again and we need to get across the equator and into the southern trade winds where we’ll have smooth sailing to Polynesia. There’s still a long way to go. I handed off to Jack at 1am and fell into a deep sleep. This morning when my alarm woke me I could tell we’d lost our wind. It looks like we won’t have much useable pressure through Monday so it’s back to coaxing a little movement from what we’ve got. In the meantime we need to clean up EV and ourselves. And sew up that window.