Another uneventful day is another good day. Nothing broken, solid breeze and sunny weather is what we want. The best I could hope for is a series of deathly dull today we sailed fast and nothing happened blog posts broken up by reports of the occasional tasty fish caught for dinner or cool critter sighting.
During our first 24 hour period we covered 192 miles, which is an average speed of eight knots. This is fantastic and I hope it holds, but I’m not about to jinx myself by getting too optimistic about a short passage with so much ocean in front of us.
There is a small group of us that all left the Galpagos for the Marquesas around the same time. Athem, an American/Canadian Hylas 46 that left earliest followed by the Norwegian Fargus 37 named Dese a day or so ahead of us. North Star, an American Tayana 52 with similar performance characteristics to Evenstar, took a two hour head start on us yesterday and we expect to be followed today or tomorrow by Cetacea, another American Cheoy Lee. We’re all strung out over a few hundred miles of ocean and in radio contact together.
We had the opportunity to meet all the crews of these boats in the Galpagos and a few of them worked out a loose scheme to meet up on the radio every night at 0230 UTC (which is about 8:30 p.m. Galpagos local time or 10:30 EST). There are larger radio networks being run by the Pacific Puddle Jump Rally (which I think we are all part of) and the Pacific Seafarer’s net but it is nice to chat with boats that are right next door to get information about local conditions.
Although we appear to be the fastest of the group of boats, in such a long low speed chase us passing anyone other than North Star is unlikely. Yesterday we were making about half a knot to a knot more than North Star, but she headed further South presumably for better current of wind predictions. With a two hour head start she was about 13 miles ahead of us when we left port. Gaining half a knot on here would mean it would take 26 hours to overhaul that two hour head start if we were traveling the same course. Likely the last we will see of her was when she dropped off the AIS last night as she continued South without us ever seeing her with our eyes. A full day even 150 miles with a smaller boat like Dese means even if we had a more substantial speed advantage like 1.5 or two knots it will take many days before we catch up to them, if at all. And even then Catch Up is relative, like North Star they could be m
iles to the North or South of the rhumb line (direct course) and we’d never see them.
But in the context of the vast Pacific ocean and a 3,000 mile trip they are close. In the event of a major problem any of us is within a day or so of helping another boat and that is a comfort.
