Half way

The wind continues to tease us. Our choice is to either sail at 6kts, or motor sail at 8kts. That may not sound like much, but it's 50miles / day and would easily add another day, maybe two depending on arrival time, to the overall trip. I'm a total believer in Steve Dashew's thesis (cruising sailor, author, yacht designer) that the safest passage is a fast passage, so we're motor sailing. We keep trying to sail every six hours or so, but so far we're about 2kts short of the wind we need to be able to sail at 7kts.

In any case we passed the half way point today. Paul and I celebrated in the late afternoon by splitting a beer in the aft end of the cockpit while basking in the sun. Our latitude is now north of San Francisco, the water temperature has dropped further and it's definitely chilly on the night watches.

We're in the "garbage patch" and we've seen a collection of stuff. Some of it is clearly tsunami debris, other is just junk. We see lots of little bits of white styrofoam and larger pieces of what looks like insulation, usually with a lot of marine growth. Then there are a lot of black and pink balls. The pink/orange ones look like fishing floats, but we can't figure out what the black ones would be. They are maybe 18" - 24" in diameter and lots of them. My favorite so far is a tub we saw this afternoon. It looked like a plastic, terra cotta colored tub about 3' long and a couple of feet deep, sitting up high on the water just floating along. Amazing that it could float this far and never fill with water.

Then finally the big news today was mid-morning when I was below sorting through the weather and our routing choices. I had been at the computer for awhile and Paul was asleep when it occurred to me that I should go up top and take a look around. I popped my head up out of the companionway for a quick look around and about 50yds in front of us was a fiberglass skiff, maybe 25' - 30' long, floating upside down. I ran back to the helm and made a quick right turn to avoid it. Then I grabbed the little Olympus camera and got a picture as it went by which I will post later. Had we hit it, I doubt it would have done anything more than cosmetic damage, but it probably would have scared the hell out of us.

A cold front arrived in the late afternoon and is sitting just to the NW. Paul dug out his weather book and we explored the dynamics of fronts and what the possible implications would be for us. All we could figure out is that there might be some rain. We're obsessed with weather, but we're not very good weatherman.

The high is stretched out on a SW/NE axis and absolutely huge, stretching far into Canada. We are not really going around the top of it as much as cutting across the lower edge. Our arcing route, which should be beginning to take shape in the position reports, takes us up to 40N (a bit north of Mendocino) before we turn directly for San Francisco. We think of it as going around something, but in reality there is nothing but water for over a 1,000 miles in every direction. I realized today that we were about equidistant from Anchorage, Hawaii and San Francisco; we're essentially in the middle of the NE Pacific. But soon we will be much closer to San Francisco.

As we're getting closer, with "only" 1,142 miles to go as I write, I'm going to start reporting an ETA each day. Keep in mind that ETA stands for Estimated Time of Arrival; emphasis on estimated. This is quite different than a scheduled time of arrival. Our mileage can and will vary. I'll start out vague and narrow it down as we get closer.

So my first ETA is the afternoon of Thursday the 20th. It turns out the timing will be particularly important due to the currents in/out of the bay. At 6pm on the 20th the current will be at maximum ebb and a full 4kts! So hopefully we can make good progress the next few days and arrive by mid-afternoon so we avoid the big ebb.