Not all who wander are lost…a couple sailing the world.

Our visions, well a lot of peoples visions, of sailing West across the Pacific is one of following the Trade Winds, gentle off the wind sailing for days on end.

Sowhy are we sailing upwind?

Last night the wind shifted more South, and more West. Right now it is blowing from a direction of about 180 – 195, or South to South Southwest (SSW). We are trying to carry a course of around 235 to fetch the Galapagos. The ocean currents are mostly sweeping us North to the tune of about a 10 degree shift in our course.

If we were racing Evenstar with the boat trimmed to our most maximum aggressive pointing upwind we could sail around 45 degrees off the wind. This is no way to live, however. Sailed like that the boat is heeled over quite a bit. Simple tasks like relieving yourself in the head become a challenge, some tasks like cooking can become quite dangerous. Additionally the autopilot is REALLY horrible at sailing the boat tight to the wind, to really make your best upwind progress you need to hand steer the boat to the breeze. This is exhausting after a while and quite difficult at night when you cant see the sails and their tell-tales so well.

So to live on a boat for 6-7 days on a passage like this you try to crack off a little from tight upwind sailing. You sail a few degrees off the best upwind the boat can do but you end up sailing flatter and you can leave the autopilot on.

What this means for us is that we cant really hold the course we want to steer to sail straight at the Galapagos. Sailing the direction we are now we will pass well North of the Archipelago. So we are pressing on under sailing hoping that either the wind will shift in the next few days, or planning to have to tack at some point and sail some more South in order not to miss the islands.

Now, about that whole Trade Winds thingyes, in theory they are there. But they tend to be away from the equator. Were less than four degrees North of the Eqautor now, and the winds arent as predictable.

Looking at the (hopefully) attached image you will see a small section of what is called a Pilot Chart. These roses represent the cumulative observations of hundreds of boats over centuries of sailingmostly counting how many times each condition is observed in each month of the year. The major rose that concerns us is the one that shows a 42 in the middle of the arrow from the South, with a 32 in the arrow from the Southeast. This indicates that in April, roughly 42% of the time the wind is from the South with an average speed of around 15 knots. Hmph. The green lines are indicative of major ocean currents.

So the largest chance of wind we might see is sort of exactly what we are seeing Southerly winds about 15 knots with ocean currents that push you more North. Cest la vie I suppose, it could be a lot less comfortable and we could have that 2% of the time when there isnt a whisper of wind.

By the way we did see more dolphins today too.

Dinner is almost ready (chicken and rice, tomato salad and home baked bread) so I need to wrap this up and try to post it.

These winds are workable, if they hold it looks like we will be in before the week ends.

Day three was another clear day with variable breeze. We have managed to sail all day but some times it hasn’t been as fast as we like. Right now at 2000 local time (0100 UTC or “zulu”) we have 8-10 knots of wind which is variable and light. Its dark so you can’t see the shifts and puffs coming. We’re happy to be holding five knots or more.

Dolphins

We started the day with a visit from a large pod of fairly good sized dolphins – tentatively Risso’s Dolphins that swam with us for a while before breakfast. They weren’t as active as some of the other dolphins we’ve seen. They happily loafed along with us without all the frenetic racing and chasing we’ve seen in some other species.

Later in the afternoon we were also joined by another pod of what we think may have been more Spinner dolphins. The coloring and markings were similar to our field guides though they did not engage in any of the acrobatic leaps and spins that characterize them. They certainly were very active and playful chasing each other around the bow. It is impossible to be anything but amused when dolphins are riding with the boat.

Garbage Gyre?

One of the stories you hear about the Pacific is the so-called Garbage Gyre, an area where currents converge and floating plastic trash is supposed to be accumulating into vast floating islands. Some say they’ve seen it, others say it is a fable.

After merely two days in the Pacific Ocean we can sayit sure seems plausible. There is almost always some sort of floating plastic thing in view, and if there isn’t there will be within a few minutes. Looking by eye, we’re probably seeing well a swath of ocean maybe 50-75 feet on either side of the boat. And we’ve been shocked at how much we’ve seen.

In the Atlantic, sure there were occasional things the most common being Mylar balloons. Out here we see plates, bags, Crocs, bottles, jugsall variety of floating plastic household trash.

It is really quite sad to see, so much more than we’d expected. But entirely consistent with what we’ve heard.

It’s not a raft or island, but if you consider that Evenstar is sweeping our little one hundred and fifty foot swatch of ocean and we almost always see something, consider how much must be spread out over the thousands of square miles of open ocean out here.

Tonight

It is a quiet evening tonight with the boat lightly heeled. The wind has moved further forward, swinging more Southerly and lightened. We aren’t sailing hard upwind, but are pretty close to it with this recent persistent shift. Hopefully it will not swing more, sailing upwind in light air is no one’s idea of fun on a passage and we might have to start burning dinosaurs if we can’t maintain 3-4 knots towards the Galapagos.

After our third day on the water we are starting to get more into the routine. Eventually our bodies will function better with the watch schedulethen we will get there!

Every now and then when on a passage you have a moment, when everything clicks and you think yeah, I could keep on doing this for a while.

Last night I was awakened about half an hour before my watch to help bring the sails in. The wind had died and we have a VERY firm safety rule board that nobody ever leaves the cockpit without someone else knowing about it. With the wind petering out to near nothing the sails start to flop as the boat starts to slow and roll more.

With our normal in shore main and Genoa combination of sails you can set the sails, reef them, and pull them in without leaving the cockpit. Off shore we have a different setup. First, we use our staysail more so we have a second inner forestay on the deck with this sail attached to it. Unlike the other sails it does not furl so it must be manually hoisted and lowered.

With the staysail also come the Check Stays, which are lines that run from the mast at the point where the inner forestay attaches to the stern. These have blocks with a 4:1 purchase on them, the upwind check stay must be tensioned very firmly, we put it on a winch. The leeward (downwind) check stay can be loose, and in it’s deployed position is a pain in the neck as it is taught behind the main sail and prevents the sail from going out. So the check stay must be loosened to allow the main to be eased which in turn means the check stay is swinging freely and rubbing an banging the boom. To prevent this we’ve been tying a small line to the check stay and securing it out of the way much like a girl with long hair will stick her hair behind an ear to keep it out of her face when she works on something in front of her.

The final offshore complication is the preventer”. It can roll a lot out in the ocean with constant swells. This motion can cause the sails to move, spilling the air. The head sails there isn’t much that can be done and beyond flogging the sails a bit they don’t do much harm. The main sail is on the boom which is heavy and can cause damage. An unintentional jibe (of gybe) where the wind passes from one side of the boat to the other behind the boat can cause the boom to slam from one side of the boat to the other with extreme violence. And as the boat rolls and bounces in the swell the boom comes up and moves and slams back when the sails fill again, bouncing and banging and causing wear and potential mayhem.

Being sailors we do what sailors do tie the darn thing down. In this case a line runs to the end of the boom which must be secured forward (to prevent the boom moving back, the main sheet arrests forward motion). Typing it up forward is a nuisance as someone must run all the way forward to the bow and untie it to make adjustments. Instead we run it through a block on the bow and return it to the stern where it is much easier to make adjustments without going forward. But someone still needs to leave the cockpit.

So sailing off shore with the sail out involves several extra steps to douse the sails drop the staysail and tie it up, ease the preventer to allow centering the main sail, and removing the tie line from the check stay and tightening it up to stop it flopping all over the place. This is no longer a solo operation.

About an hour after we doused the sails and about half an hour into my midnight to three o’clock watch we were still motoring when the wind came up gain. I was by myself in the cockpit, everyone else was below asleep, and I could tell I was getting wind back to sail. We left the main sail up because not-flat conditions when motoring the sail acts as a serious damper on boat motion, without it we would roll back and forth a lot more. So it is typical to motor-sail with the main up unless what little wind there is causes the sail to flog.

Working slowly I let out the Genoa and killed the engine. The breeze was PERFECT, about fifteen knots just forward of the center of the boat. I cracked the main off as far as I could against the taught leeward runner, trimmed the Genoa, and sat back with a smile.

The sailing conditions were right in Evenstar’s sweet spot. When you hit a line drive off the meat of a baseball bat or catch your driver perfectly straight up the middle of the fairway with no slice or hook you can feel it when you’ve done it right. Just so with Evenstar reaching in fifteen knots of breeze. The boat is powered up and moving fast but not over powered, the sails are trim and taught there is little moving or flapping the boat feels as right as it can.

Couple that with a bright evening with perfect temperatures and a near full moon dappling the water with reflected light, no noise but the splashing and hissing of the hull through the waves, and you just have to sit back, breathe deep and enjoy the moment.

An other beautiful day on the high seas today, nary a cloud to be found. And for a few hours at mid day, nary a whisper of wind.

But fortunately that didn’t last too long. So far the weather is defying the models and we have enough wind to move the boat effectively under sail. She’s a lovely sailing boat, but weighing in at close to 56,000 pounds when the wind is just a whisper…well that isn’t her optimal conditions. The prevailing wind was Northerly by Northeast, which put it almost behind us as well.

We didn’t do any fishing today as I expected the wind to be fluky and require some sail changes (OK, maybe I didn’t feel like cleaning any fish, either). I wasn’t wrong as we started out the day making more than nine knots, eventually to have to stow the sails when the wind itself dropped to two or three knots. After a couple of hours of motoring though the wind began to come back, and with seven to eight knots now on the beam which we could sail to. We’ve not had the engine on since.

At dinner we were treated to a good sized pod of Spinner dolphins jumping and frolicking in the waves in the distance. A number of them broke towards us, apparently to come play in our wakes, but the whole pod didn’t come so they turned back. At the end of dinner another pod in the distance could be seen making spectacular leaps out of the water and slashing back down with a cannonball of spray. It is tough to tell distances in the air from a ways off, but they certainly looked like they were getting 10 feet or more in the air if they were 5-6 foot dolphins.

Tonight I’d like to also send a shout out to the Seven Hills School class of 1984. My classmates tonight are celebrating our thirtieth reunion and of course we are unable to make it. This would have been a fun one to make as a lot has changed in our lives. So to all of you back there, hello and sorry we couldn’t be there with you! Think of us out here almost 100 miles off the Panama coast.

Tonights watch remains still, and we will settle in for a couple of hours with an audio book before shift sleeping starts. Will is taking 9-midnight, I take midnight to 3:00 a.m., Kathy takes 3:00-6:00 and Danielle gets up at 6:00 to relieve her as it gets light. It is nice sailing with kids old enough to share the watch!

Finally at 2:00 local time we pulled the anchor and left Panama!

At first the seas were glassy and we left under power. As we cleared Tabogo Island a nice fresh breeze picked up and we’ve been sailing ever since. The wind has dropped a bit in the evening but for a few hours we were reaching along averaging about 9 knots. Too bad it won’t old or we’d bein the Galapagos in five days! The forecast though is for lighter wind in a couple of days.

Early on a pod of what appeared to be small whales (rather than dolphins) swam past us but didn’t approach to closely. We didn’t think they were dolphins because of their size and the visibility of their breath, but they didn’t really come close enough to get a good look.

After a meal of Danielle’s Jamaican meat patties we settled in to listen to an audio book. As the sun set we heard…breathing, and splashing! A pod of dolphins joined us for about ten minutes of riding our quarter wake.

We are getting settled now and readying for a night of watch as we get back in to the rhythms of a long passage.