Nothing broke today! Whoo-hoo!

Hand steering and the new watch schedule seem to be working out pretty well so far. We’ll see how we make out after a few days of it but everyone is grabbing sleep when they can and so far so good. In a few days it will settle into routine and rhythm.

Piscatorial Body Count

Every morning we get a special treat from Neptune on our decks, various species of flying fish manage to strand themselves almost every night. We are used to this from the Atlantic – you just flick them over board when you walk forward the next morning, though I know some people that insist fresh fish makes a wonderful breakfast. Its not surprising, flying fish by the thousands scatter in any given day and they can get some serious air, I’ve seen them fly completely across the boat and land on the other side.

The Pacific has offered a new treat for the morning walkabout somehow the squid manage to leap out of the water as well.

I had no idea they could do this. Frankly, being raised on the Alien movies I suppose I find the idea of many legged slimy things launching themselves in the air at night to be vaguely disturbing. When we brought Evenstar home to Florida and errant flying fish clobbered one of the delivery crew in the dark, leading to accusations and exchanges of charlie-horse punches until they paused to wonder about the fishy smell. Getting hit with a flying fish would be startling, getting hit with a flying squid would be appalling.

We have had several theories of HOW these squid are getting airborne. When we arrived in the Galápagos we had a squid on top of the dodger, which is some ten feet off the water. Around the Galápagos at night we had swallow tailed gulls as constant companions after dark, they are night hunters and feed on small fish and squid. One theory is that particularly clumsy gulls were dropping the squid on the deck. This was a weak hypothesis though, especially as the end result serves neither gull (goes hungry), squid (still gets dead) or Evenstar crew (has to scrape a nasty sun baked squid off the deck).

The second hypothesis is that they get carried in the waves and spray. There is a fair amount of that all night when we are off shore. But then we take very few waves over the dodger, I’ve only see that once in truly awful conditions. Which leaves the third disturbing alternative that the squid, presumably when avoiding predators, are capable of launching themselves out of the water up to ten feet in the air. Yech.

The total for this morning:

Flying Fish: 9
Squid: 5

This represents a new over-night record for both the vertebrate and invertebrate categories.

We’ve started a nightly guessing pool on the critter count in the morning, feel free to join in the comments. There is no prize, but if you want to experience this in reality you can buy some frozen squid and herring at a bait shop and throw it on your driveway for a few hours. Then go clean it up.

Sailing Today

Today’s conditions haven’t been quite as good as the first few days. Last night and this morning we had some drops in the wind and only completely 190 miles for the day, today we are on a pace for less.

Our navigation software, Maxsea, has a Routing module which is supposed to take the weather conditions from a current file you download, couple it to the rough sailing characteristics of your boat, and create an optimal route to sail for best wind and current.

We decided for the first time to give one of these optimal routes a go. The predictions looked pretty constant no matter where you went but there are some ocean currents out there that can affect you for better or worse depending on how you sail through them sailing 20 of 50 miles further North or South can sometimes make the difference between a knot of current in your face or pushing you from behind.

In theory.

In practice the jury is still out on who well we like this whole weather routing module thing. It operates on some assumptions of our boat performance that I don’t agree with, and it also works off of a large scale computer model for prevailing weather conditions. It doesn’t get into micro-forecasting what your exact local conditions are.

Part of why today has been slow is that we sailed more South on the guidance of the routing software. We reviewed it’s suggestions and decided they made as much sense or more as anything we were doing so far. However late this morning the wind shifted East and dropped. This meant that our boat speed dropped as the wind was more at our backs, and the ocean roll made keeping our sails full a struggle. Some of the routing is contrary to suggestions made in books like Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes, which does make you wonder a bit. Of course the books are only a guideline too, only the skipper in the boat knows what the local conditions are.

With the wind where it is it isn’t practical to sail back North to where we were and undo the routing, so we make the best of it. The suggested route has us swinging more Westerly and less South in a couple of days, crossing back over our rhumb-line course and sailing North of it for better current. We’ll see how it goes.