Underway - Day 1 and 2

Dolphins surrounded the boat as we left Ant Atoll.

Just in time for supper tonight, we caught a fish. Finally! I won't tell you how small it was, just that it was a Mahi Mahi and it was the perfect size to feed our little family.

Our first "little" fish.

Eventually, we caught two more.

That's the first major event that has happened on this passage. So I guess that makes it a pretty good passage. Our wind has been fair, but we've spent today motor sailing. The trades haven't quite settled in and the wind keeps shifting a bit and the speed varies as well. But we're making good time. We should be arriving in our little atoll tomorrow, early afternoon.

I was trying to think of something interesting to write in this update and couldn't really think of anything. The biggest thing on my mind this time is how much I wish I enjoyed these passages more. I haven't gotten sick on this one, but at the same time, I don't feel my best. I get nervous and I'm sure that doesn't help things. I wish I was more comfortable out here. I keep saying it's because we haven't been out in a while, but I know that's not true. I'm just getting more honest... The good news is that it will just be these short passages between atolls so even though I won't have time to get acclimated, I won't be very far from land for long.

Stay tuned...we have no idea what we'll find tomorrow. From the looks of Google earth, it's a bit populated. I don't think it will be too "native" but we'll see!

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A day at sea

Apologies up front...I actually did take pictures for this post and that's why I waited to post it.  But my camera is on the fritz and I keep losing pictures... Sorry for the long read, hopefully it will keep your attention.

The most frequent questions we get from friends, family and strangers, by far, is “How does Jake do on the boat?” and “What does he do while you’re underway?”

Since we’re underway now, I decided to just go ahead and give you a day in the life of the crew, focusing on Jake of course. J  It’s really not all that exciting, but our families are enjoying stories about Jake so this is for them.  It might get a bit boring, but to be fair…you asked.

My last “official” watch of the night starts at 5:00am.  Jake has decided he likes sunrises and has taken to waking up very early to share this time with me.  He’s even asked me to wake him up if he doesn’t get up on his own.  So we start our day sitting in the cockpit waiting on the sun to come up.  Sometimes we tell stories; sometimes we just cuddle, other times we talk about our dreams or whatnot.  This morning, he reminded me of a story we read about a rabbit shooting the sun because he was so thirsty and dry from the sun continuously shining.  The sun then shot out fire and the rabbit hid under a bush for cover.  That’s why the rabbit hides when the sun shines and the sun rises slowly instead of popping up (like it used to, according to our little tale)…to make sure the rabbit isn’t waiting there to shoot him.

We put the fishing lines out and following the sunrise, depending on what time it is (we keep changing time zones so sunrise changes too), Jake plays a little bit before time for breakfast and school.  When I say “play” throughout this post, you can bet I usually mean some sort of war game.  He loves war games…partly because he’s a Navy kid, and partly because he loves history and well, that’s all we read about really.  Think about it…most history is just war.  I can’t say that I’m thrilled about this, but I can at least say that he uses his imagination like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  I find him pretending to be kings, emperors, generals, and any kind of leader you can imagine.  Today he had me tell our friends and family in the United States that they needed to move to Australia (particularly our friends in VA) because he had quite the battle going on the coast of Norfolk and they needed to be safe.  But not to worry because he was in charge and he hasn’t lost a war yet.  Sometimes he even mixes it up by fighting pirates with space weapons and using his Zillo Beast armor (from the Clone Wars cartoons) to keep from getting killed by the bow and arrows of the Celts. 

Usually, Andy gets up around 7:30, I make breakfast and we all eat together.  If we haven’t already started school, we get it going after I do the dishes.  School usually takes about an hour and a half when we’re underway.  If the conditions are rough…we take a “teacher workday” as both Jake and I get seasick, especially if we read.  But this trip, the seas are good, so we do a full day of school.

By 9:00, I’m tired so off to bed I go.  If any school is not finished, Andy supervises the rest of it.  I really don’t know what they do while I nap, but judging by what’s happening when I get up, I think they either watch a movie, play on the iPad, or Jake plays while Andy tinkers with the sails and checks our position.

I wake up around 11:30 – 12:00 and make lunch (sometimes Andy makes his own if he doesn’t like what I’m having).  Jake is usually asking to play on the iPad about every 10 minutes at this point (damn that thing…I never should have bought it).  We try to hold out until after lunch…usually.  After lunch, I do dishes and Jake asks again if he can play on the iPad.  At this point, we usually give in (assuming he had a good day at school).  He plays a variety of games ranging from shooting tanks to feeding a dragon...he even plays some math and spelling games every once in a while.  I sit outside and read a book or just chat with Andy.  Sometime around 1:00 – 1:30, Andy goes to take a nap.  I either continue to read a book or I try to do something with Jake…read one of his books, do a science experiment, play with Lego’s, art, etc.  Other things I try to encourage Jake to do (usually unsuccessfully):  puzzles, hero factory toys, draw, trace pictures, read (whatever).  Andy gets up and we usually let Jake watch a movie while we fiddle around.  I might get the mail and some updated weather off the SSB.  We might have a snack… Today we did something we don’t normally do and watched a grown up show!! We watched Top Chef ( a dvd from the food network) and afterwards Jake wanted to play “chef” so we had to pretend we cooked a desert and rate each others desert based on taste.  Jake made a cupcake with the center filled with jellybeans, nuts and rum (don’t ask me!).  Andy made a chocolate molten lava cake with amaretto topping and I made a pumpkin cheesecake with maple syrup topping.  Jake won the most stars as Andy and I sabotaged each other in our scoring.  His didn’t get cooked enough and ran off my plate.  According to him, mine made him sick.

About 5:00 rolls around and its time for me to make dinner.  After dinner, I do dishes and Andy and Jake usually start their “man movie.”  At 6:00, our official night watches start and I go to take a nap while Andy takes watch (both movie and boat).  He puts Jake to bed and at 9:00 wakes me up for my watch.  On watch I usually listen to music, write, play on the iPad (yes, I do get some time on the thing occasionally), and watch a movie…peaking around every 10 minutes or so to make sure we’re not running into anything.  I wake Andy up at 1:00 and presumably, he does the same for the next 4 hours.  Then it starts all over.

It’s not fascinating, but that’s what we do.  With the advent of GPS and all these fancy electronics, there’s not a lot of actual “sailing” stuff we need to do – given our style of cruising.  There are some die hards out there who study up on celestial navigation and give that a poke.  They don’t believe in watching movies on watch (or maybe they don’t have electricity).  Many folks don’t have kids so find other things to fill their days.  Most people I’ve talked to read an awful lot under way and I met one lady who even did laundry on her night watch.  If it sounds like we watch a lot of movies, it's because we do.  Life "at sea" is very different than life at anchor...not a lot of places to run around and conditions usually dictate how much "play" can actually happen as well.  We try not to "plug" Jake in too much, but well, life gets in the way of being mommy of the year sometimes.

So there you have it…a day in the life.  We’re on day 2 now…1 more to go and we’ll be in Pohnpei.  We’ve learned some of our acquaintances that left Majuro a good bit before us are still there so we’ll have some catching up to do.

10/26/2011 - Passage to Majuro

Sorry for the delay in posting... communications have been very difficult here.  Below is a post from our passage.  I'll follow up soon with our Halloween posts.

It was another windless passage, not entirely surprising to us, as we knew they would be “light.”  This one was different though in that we didn’t have enough diesel to motor the whole way.  We haven’t filled up since American Samoa and we’ve been motoring quite a bit, so this passage we had to save a little.  We flew the spinnaker in some of the lightest winds ever, making about 2.5 knots for a day’s average.  Talk about mundane.  Then we hit a storm that gave us some 25-30 knot winds and were able to make significant ground with just the jib out.  All the while, bucking a 2-3 knot current.  Jimmy Cornell’s passage making book (kind of the bible, if you will, for sailors) talks about a sporadic current, but for us, it has been extremely consistent for the last 500 miles.  Where we would normally make 5 – 6 knots under motor, we were only making 2.5 – 4.0. 

Out of 16 days at sea over the past 3 weeks, we’ve had about 4-5 good days of sailing, 9-10 days of flat calm, and one day of nothing but squalls.  That day was the last day.  After that first storm, and seeing how it moved us along pretty well, we started actually hoping for squalls so we could sail and cut the engines off.  Be careful what you wish for.  We never saw anything over 30 knots but on our last day, they were everywhere.  And the winds were coming from all different directions as well as the waves.  It was the only time I’ve ever actually seen a squall slow a boat down.  We were still motoring but with the current and the waves on our nose, we actually lost a knot or two with ever squall.  Finally, in the last 12 hours, even though we were still getting rain we finally started to move a bit more.  The bad part was the bucking back and forth.  We’ve certainly been in worse weather, but after days and days of no weather, it was a lot to get used to.

Despite the weather, moods were surprisingly high and it turned out to be a pretty good passage.  Cabin fever was kicking in for some of our shorter crew, so we believe we arrived in the nick of time. 

Without giving a day by day blow, here are some highlights of the passage:

• Stopping to clean the prop.  We gained a complete knot just by knocking of some barnacles, all the while, boosting crew moral with a little swim in this stifling heat.
• Science experiments.  We made boats from our trash and tested them in a bucket of saltwater.  We watched water evaporate (well not literally “watched) from a bowl of seawater to leave salt.  We made a rainwater measuring device to be used in Majuro to measure rainfall each day.
• We caught another deep sea fish, this one with sticky goo all over it.  Andy said it was the nastiest stuff he had ever had on his hands and took forever to clean off.
• Andy and Jake had one very long monopoly game where Jake learned the meaning of bankrupt and tycoon.
• Trying to think of different ways to cook the same thing.  How many ways can you cook canned corn, canned mushrooms, canned beans, sundried tomatoes, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic?, chayote, and cheese?  If you throw in pasta, rice and the occasional homemade bread, you would be surprised.

Note the little boats we made...he's checking to see which ones float.

His tinfoil raft was the best.

 This last one was truly my job each day.  It’s about all we have left onboard and trying to make at least one interesting, remotely healthy meal a day was a challenge.  Now Jake and I don’t mind a few vegetarian meals, but the Captain, well, he’s a different story.  The first few days we were fine.  We had some pork and some frozen lobster from Tarawa.  But the last few days, the only meat we had to work with was some Chinese sausages, canned hotdogs, and  some other sausage he picked up in Tarawa – none of which were very appetizing to me.  We did have some frozen chicken and bacon, but they were deep under two layers of ice – not happening.  The best results were my pastas with creamy sauces, what’s not to love?  I do have to give another well deserved shout out for the vegetable chayote.  It goes by the name of cho-co in this part of the world.  In other parts I think it’s also called christophene.  This is the heartiest vegetable I have ever seen.  We bought a mess of it in Mexico but it had long been gone when I finally found some more in Samoa.  We bought about 15 of them for 2 tala (about a dollar) and it’s all I have left that’s fresh.  You peel it and it can be used in a number of ways.  You can cut it up and use it in a salad to add a crunch.  It can be added to stir fry or pasta.  It takes on the taste of whatever you’re cooking so it’s a very non intrusive ingredient.  I also have a great quickbread recipe that I make for breakfast sometimes using shredded chayote.  The list goes on and on…au’ gratin, fried chayote cakes, etc.  You can find them in most American grocery stores (at least on the west coast), and they’re fairly inexepensive.  They’re green and kind of prickly, sometimes sticky.  That’s why you have to peel them.  They also come in a white version but I have only seen those in Samoa.  If you’re looking for something new to try…  Ok, I’ve given more than enough time to our eating habits…moving on.

So here we are in Majuro.  We’re optimistic about what it has to offer.  Our guidebooks say there is a restaurant called Monica’s and another one called Savannah’s.  Surely there is something for us here.

Trip statistics and long awaited pictures

Here are the long awaited pictures!!!  Surprisingly, we didn’t take a ton of pictures, so hopefully no one is disappointed.

I also thought I would include a few statistics…they’re all approximate as we are horrible at keeping track of things, but it gives you an idea of how the trip went.

Miles:  2700 Nautical Miles

Time:  21 ½ days

Motor time:  approximately 50 hours

Equator crossing coordinates:

Doldrum days:  2

Fuel used:  35 gallons

# fish caught:  3

# of fish that got away:  3

Days without fresh veggies:  0!!!!!

Full night’s sleep:  2

Fights between crew members:  0!!!!!

Growls between crew members:  3 (mostly spinnaker induced)

The infamous Spinnaker!

Working on "Helper Words" during school.

Jake with his shaving cream Neptune crown, becoming a shellback!

The result of Andy having a little fun with us while crossing the equator.
For those that don't know, Andy has crossed the equator 3 times now, so there
was no ceremony for him.

About to swim across

We sent a message in a bottle from the crew.

Our first yellowtail...

Jake measuring our second yellowtail for his fish log.

He had to use all his muscle to get this up!

One of many sushi nights.

The last and best fish...Skipjack Tuna!!

I tried to fight this boobie bird off with a broom, but he wasn't having it.
He bit my broom and stayed around for more than 24 hours.

Our first sight of land

Hiva Oa

The harbor at Atuona as we pulled in.

11/9/2010 - Mazatlan, here we come

Mazatlan, it’s a 2 ½ day, 240 mile trip for us.  It’s been at least a month since we did an overnighter and not since the beginning of our trip have we had to do 2 nights, so we’re long overdue.  I’m considering this my training and part of work ups to our soon to be much longer passages across the Pacific.

Using that line of thinking, I decided to prepare a little better this time.

I took my seasick pills a full 24 hours ahead of time.  They tend to take a long time to get into my system and don’t always work the first day if I wait to late.  I’ve tried all types of things from Dramamine to wristbands.  The only sure thing I’ve found so far is Scopamine. You can get it in Mexico really cheap.  I think I 50 pills cost me $5 in LaPaz.

Another thing I did this time that I should have done before was to make some meals ahead of time.  Again, being prone to sickness, spending time in the galley doesn’t usually work for me.  But, I also hate to eat leftover’s and make ahead dinners always seem like leftovers for me (I know, it’s not the same thing).  This time, I made Tamales so all I would have to do is steam them.  I made enough for one lunch and one dinner.  Then I saved the leftover filling for us to put on Tostadas for lunch the other day.  I’m not very creative when it comes to lunches so I was pretty proud that I won’t be serving any sandwiches on this trip.

For Jake, I had grand plans of making sure we continued on with his schooling during this passage.  But plans are meant to be changed (or so my husband keeps telling me).  I’ve learned not to get too stressed if he ends up watching a few movies or having to play by himself more than usual.  It’s temporary.  I’m not a bad mommy.  We tried to get him involved today (i.e. get outside and away from the Star Wars) Tonight, I let Jake look at the radar and tell me if any ships were coming.  He asked me “Do we have our port and starboard lights on mommy?”

“Yes, sweetie. We do.”

“That’s good.  It’s important to have our nabigation lights on, right?”

“Yes, very important.”

“I wonder if Darth Vader’s Death Star has nabigation lights?”

And so it goes…

As I’m about to end my watch, I’m starting to think about Thanksgiving (it’s sneaking up on us) and where we’re going to be, what we’re going to do, eat, etc.  And I realize that this year we have more to be thankful for than ever before.  Not only are we all healthy and happy, but we’re living our dream and experiencing things I never in my life imagined I would experience.  And we’ve just gotten started.  We’ve passed our six month mark, the time where we were going to assess and determine if we should continue.  I think the consensus with the crew is, yes.