Right now it's too little wind. We've been motoring for three days and it looks like we'll motor for another three days. We've been mostly motor sailing, meaning we have the sails up while motoring. It's normal to have a reefed main up to help stabilize the boat, but we've also had the jib up a lot of the time. We trim the sails, and tweak our course, to get as much push out of the wind as possible in addition to the motor. Yesterday's noon-noon distance was 187nm which means our efforts produced a good push out of the wind, even though it never blew over 7-8kts.
There is no going over the top of the high as I wrote a few day ago, not this trip. The high is stretched out along a 1,000 mile SW/NE axis from just to the NW of us to north of British Columbia. We are nipping across the southern edge of the high, encountering light headwinds (i.e., from the east) in the process. We could go further north to avoid the light head winds, but it's just more miles and at best a sum zero trade off with motoring into the wind. And we're using the headwinds to push us along also, changing course by a bit to have the wind hit the main at a good angle and help us, or at least not hurt us. At least that's our theory. And Paul and I are very good at inventing theories!
There are no wind waves, but we've had a variety of fairly large swells. Looking out over the ocean is like looking out over blue undulating sand dunes, except that the dunes are constantly in motion. We climb up a dune, then slide down the other side. The swells come from different directions so sometimes they conspire to present an unusual shape or slope and New Morning obliging traverses whatever we encounter.
We're managing our engine speed to stretch out the fuel consumption. We sailed 4,000 miles from the Galapagos to Tahiti and only used 100 gallons of fuel because we had reliable trade winds. On this trip I think we'll probably use virtually all of New Morning's 280 gallons of fuel; we may end up motoring over 1,100 miles on this trip. Not our first choice, but as long as we safely reach our destination then it's a good passage.
There have been a pair of albatrosses around the boat for the last day. I'm pretty sure they're albatrosses as they have a huge wing span. They swoop and glide over the waves and rarely flap their wings. They fly right on the surface of the water, their wing tips can't miss the water by more than a few inches and they go for a long time without a single flap, gliding up and down and in and out of the waves. Unlike the Ancient Mariner we will do the birds no harm, and though we are as a painted ship on a painted ocean, our water maker keeps us well stocked in fresh water.
Which is good because we need to wash down the mountain of cookies and brownies that Fay and Caitlin made for us! Last night (two nights ago as you read this) we had a near tragedy. I discovered ants (how / why we have ants on a sailboat at sea is another story) had invaded the cookie box! Horrors! I meticulously removed the offenders from each cookie and brownie, placed the deserts in a new container and killed the offending insects. Now we keep the cookie box on top of the stove where the ants never visit.
You may recall our near miss with the upside down skiff two days ago. Fortunately yesterday we saw very little floating debris, virtually none. So with luck we are past those hazards.
The water temperature continues to fall, and with it the air temperature. I was actually cold in my bunk this evening when I got up at midnight. When I grabbed the stainless hand rails on the companionway they felt cold to the touch. I got out the blue tape and covered up most of the dorade vent which was blasting cold air into the aft cabin. Then I dug out the heavy blanket that Fay had set aside for us. I checked the engine room temperature and found in that it was only 93 degrees despite running full time for three days; it used to be that hot in French Polynesia when the engine wasn't even running. But alas, seeking further validation I checked the galley thermometer and it still read 74 degrees! Apparently there is a wide gap between "cooler" and "cold".
But it really is cooler. There are no more squalls, just puffy cumulus clouds which made for a nice sunset. Not the towering thunderheads that plagued us for the first five days (see farmers, fisherman and sailors above).
Tonight is a moonless night, totally clear with a zillion stars, the milky way, etc. Stars that reach right down to the horizon in every direction. But it feels a bit like visiting an observatory as the night air is cold and the 13kts of apparent wind (generated by the boat motoring through the night) adds a wind chill. It could be well down into the 60's! But don't worry, Paul has brought all his ski clothes and I have expedition pants and Patagonia shirts and jackets. And like wimps we hide under the hard dodger out of the wind. If all else fails we'll turn on the heater inside the boat and Paul will make more tea.
Less than a 1,000 miles to San Francisco, and actually almost the same, just 60 miles further, to Seattle. That's an oddity that we explored earlier today. How could we be right at the latitude of San Francisco, yet equidistant to Seattle which is pretty much the same longitude as SF? It's the deceptive Mercator projection. In reality the distance between the lines of longitude narrows dramatically as you approach the poles so while we would have to traverse the same amount of longitudinal difference, the actual distance is much less and offsets the required travel in latitude.
Ok, I can see I'm losing you so let me cut to the chase. Seattle and San Diego are essentially equidistant from Honolulu (about 2,300 miles), and San Francisco is about 200 miles closer at roughly 2,100 miles. Isn't geography fun?
ETA: Thursday afternoon, September 20th (remember, estimated, not scheduled)
