Passage to Fatu Hiva

All these weird island names, can any of you keep up? We're currently on a 10 hr passage to Fatu Hiva, the Marquesan island furthest south, against the wind and thus less frequently visited by cruisers, where Tappa is still made from tree bark. We have a beautiful sunny day with 10 knots of wind from the east and little swell, so the upwind course is very comfortable. We're traveling with Conversations, another Vancouver boat and have had great fun with Cress and Irena sailing, snorkeling, shopping for provisions, hiking, visiting ruins, and of course eating and drinking over the last week since they arrived.

We left Tahuata Island at 6 am this morning where we had anchored in two different bays over the last 2 days, both of which had great snorkeling. It was so great to be in that clear turquoise water you see on postcards, jumping in to cool off just whenever, and snorkeling a couple of times a day. We visited the beach at one of the bays, collected coconuts and limes growing wild and made Coco Locos for Happy Hour by mixing a "super saturated sugar solution" Gary made the day before by boiling pineapple skins, with fresh coconut juice from green coconuts and lime juice. Oh, and some rum. Can you say YUM!? Unfortunately, Gary accidentally rubbed by a wasp nest while lime-hunting, and got 3 nasty stings. Later in the afternoon, he got 2 jellyfish stings on his neck. We figure he's had his fill of stings, but was happy as a four year old in a candy store when we caught a huge Dorado (Mahi Mahi) afterwards, on the sail between anchorages. This was our biggest fish yet at a metre long, and leapt out of the water 3 times on the hook before we reeled it in. We cracked out the wasabi and had a scrumptious sashimi afternoon snack with Cress and Irena, followed by coconut encrusted Mahi Mahi steaks for dinner.

Fatu Hiva is the most lush of the Marquesan islands and has a beautiful anchorage nearby a small village and a one hour hike to a huge waterfall with a swimming hole. We'll let you know how it goes.

Southern Marquesas

We've been in Hiva Oa for a few days now and are getting ready to move on. We're hoping that the weather will cooperate to allow us to sail to Fatu Hiva, a spectacular island to the south. Then we'll likely visit Tahuata before heading north to Oa Pou and then Nuka Hiva. As Canadians, we get a month visa upon entry with an option to extend it to three months. To do the extension, however, we need to post a bond equivalent to two plane tickets back to Canada (nearly $3000) and no Visa credit cards have been able to processed at the one bank on the island due to some malfunction, so we're stuck in bureaucratic limbo at the moment (one month is not enough time to get through French Polynesia). Anyway, we're confident that it'll get sorted out one way or another.

It's been lots of fun in our anchorage, with cruising boats from around the world. We were the smallest boat in the anchorage until today, when an Italian single hander turned up in his bathtub of a boat. One couple was actually from Deep River (Ontario) and knew John Coleman's (our brother-in-law) family (a very small world considering the size of Deep River).

We are lucky to be able to communicate with the locals, who only speak French and Marquesian. While I frowned when Lo loaded a massive copy of 501 French Verbs on board in Vancouver, I have to admit that it has come in handy. While neither of us had used our French for years, we're surprised by how quickly and easily it came back. Granted, we probably speak like 5 year olds, but hey, it gets the job done.

Salut

Land Ho!!!! Marquesas at Last.

We had two bets on the homestretch to the Marquesas: spotting land first and whether Gary would catch a fish before we landed. Gary was ahead in previous bets 2 nil, but Lo was ready to get on the board. We were only about 50 miles off the coast when Gary started his evening watch (2200 - 0300), but he would go to sleep that night with sore eyes from squinting and no land in sight. Lo worked diligently to ensure that we weren't going to hit land, plotting out our position every hour and adjusting course accordingly. Just before sunrise a grey smudge appeared on the horizon, getting larger with each mile. Sunrise was spectacular, with the early morning rays illuminating the jagged mountains and ridges of Hiva Oa, our destination. Lo was filming the sunrise when she noticed a fluorescent flash just behind the boat...a beautiful mahi mahi (dorado) on the extra hand line that Gary had set up to target tuna. Of course, that got Gary right out of bed (more effective than any alarm clock), so we were both up when the pod of dolphins came by and surfed the waves with us as we were running towards the Baie Tahahuku, next to the village of Atuona. We were surprisingly nervous to be so close to land after all that time at sea, but were soon anchored safely. There was a music festival on in town that afternoon, so we shrugged off our fatigue and went to catch the music. The town has built a traditional festival area comprised of huge rock benches covered with thatched awnings for shade. A band was belting out a mix of french reggae and Marquesian music. We saw a dance performance put on by 5 and 6 year-old girls, they were so cute. Dinner at the local food stall and a nice cold beer for Gary...then back to the boat. That night we actually got to sleep at the same time and for a full 8 hours!!!

The Countdown is ON!

That's right... 105 nm to go! We're hoping to make landfall tomorrow around noon in Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa, Marquesas. There's a bet on-board regarding who'll see land first and yell "Land Ho!!!". Gary's up on Lo, 2:0 in our eye-spy contest. He was the first to spot brown pelicans, or any indication of warmer temperatures since leaving Vancouver, and the first to spot the Hollywood sign in L.A. Lo's hoping to gain some ground although she's at a bit of a disadvantage as we'll be within visible range this evening, on Gary's watch (and she's a foot shorter). Rumours have it that Lo's planning to stay up all night to improve her odds....

Rap of a Modern Mariner

We crossed the Equator yesterday and held a Neptune's Bash. Our festivities included a reading of the original Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, a head shaving (Gary's), and sunset cocktails featuring champagne (thanks Norm). This Rap (dedicated to Walter K.) was composed by Lo and I last night as an update to Coleridge's great effort. It's really long, but then so is this passage.

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RAP OF THE MODERN MARINER

Aye the modern mariner
Drifting 'pon the sea
A diff'rent breed of sailor
Than those of history

With GPS and laptop
Radar and weatherfax
They take their boats and voyage forth
Some never to come back

The dream is old, up here in the cold
But at least we have the boat
The refit takes forever
"Let's paint another coat"

Chips in the hold, the beer fridge cold
What more could a sailor want?
Watermaker and satellite phone
Are they really needed for this jaunt?

To West Marine with credit card
Do we really need more gear?
And let's not forget, the worst part yet
We'd have to unload some beer!

"Best of Lucks" and docklines cut
We head out down the coast
On our late winter's passage
"Hey, where're the other boats?"

Under sunny skies and a fresh north breeze
We continue on our way
But not too far, for we've been told
"There's great Mexican in Coos Bay"

On to San Francisco,
The city by the Bay
Then to see the Great White Shark
At the aquarium in Monterey

The City of Angels, what a place
Filled with family and friend
But alas we hear the Sou' Sea's call
And this stage of fun must end

Now we're sailin' offshore
O'er the swell and through the fog
With HF Radio and modem
We can still update the blog

Into the seas gentle rhythm
Finally we do fall
Reveling in the vastness
And the beauty of it all

Be it autopilot or wind vane
The boat, she steers herself
Where'd we put that scrabble game?
T'is over on that shelf

Pointed south, she moves along
Slowly gaining miles
Ne'er faster than a golf cart
She hums along in style

The water ever warmer
Birds swooping from the south
Flying fish slam into the decks
Gaping at the mouth

The icechest now a cupboard
Produce getting thin
We toss those that'd be rotten
Into Ole King Neptune's bin

By day, the sun shines bright
The cabin it does bake
Time to finally install those fans
For comfort we must make

Dorado, Bonito, or tuna
Fish biting at the bait
Haul 'em up o'er the stern
Canned chicken can surely wait

Southern stars and a slice of moon
The nights company
One wave at a time, Demelza
She pushes through the sea

Radio Guru Ron
Calls us every day
Along with friendly Peter,
Whose antenna's by the Bay

Talking to Ron and Peter,
Each evening on our sched
Their reports to our families
Helps to calm their dread

We owe a lot to these radio jocks
For all the time they toil
But I think We'd have strangled 'em
If they'd made us put in more foil

Pacific Seafarers, what a net
Such charming men are they
That also track our long voyage
Taking roll call from the Bay

The many nights of little sleep
The hardest part of all
Chocolate, books and tooth-picks
They help the 'lids not fall

With headlamp and a laptop
Writing emails through the night
A phone patch, that'd be lovely
To calm our Mothers' fright

Nor'westerlies push us south
The ITCZ at last
Squalls, rain, no wind and thunder
We fear lightning on the mast

Through the doldrums we did push
Motor sailing to make speed
Just where is the exit door?
To this we beg and plead

Blue sky again at last
A southern swell now comes
The ship now in sou'easterlies
Puts in a long days run

Currents, now they ply us
East and west they flow
The GPS, a dandy aid
Ciphers their fickle flows

The Equator now right below us
Cutting the earth in two
We pop open some champagne
And give Neptune his part due

So here we lie, out in the sea
Nigh land to be found
Demelza's compass points southwest
For we are island bound

We're on to the The Marquesas
Land of the fierce Typee
Like Melville, we do ponder
Cannibals, will there be?

And what of the Ancient Mariner
Who shot that big gentle bird?
On those dark and windy nights
His moans can still be heard.

Pacific Musings

Oh, that title sounds so literary, doesn't it? Well, sorry to disappoint you, just another hack posting from the high seas. Today we thought that we'd try and capture a few odds and sods about the trip that haven't necessarily made it into a blog posting.

Oceanography - The average water depth that we've been in over the last few weeks has been about 5-km deep, except for an area with lots of sea mounts that we passed over a couple of weeks ago. The biggest ones I saw on the chart came to within a few hundred meters of the surface.

Meals - We eat about 2 meals a day now (breakfast and dinner). Lunch has been replaced by a small snack. We find that this works best for our energy level/weight balance, especially since we've perfected the art of lounging in the last three weeks.

Food - We've had some good results with keeping our fresh food going, with the stars being eggs, citrus, apples, cucumbers, and potatoes. Notwithstanding, we still have lost about a quarter of our stores to rotting (yuck). We have found that junk food doesn't rot at all (science at work for all of us!) and are now planning to completely restock our pantry with chips, pop, and Twinkies for the next passage.

Navigation - WARNING all of you who are you using Global Positioning System (GPS) for navigation. We've been practicing taking celestial fixes with our NEW sextant and have discovered that GPS fixes can be off by up to a hundred miles or more! Most interesting is that the error seems to be positively correlated with wave height and has been decreasing slightly each time we make comparative observations. We'll keep you posted as this development unfolds.

Stardust Trails - The past couple of weeks have had quite dark nights, with full cloud cover and/or no moon. While eerie, these evenings are perfect to watch the bioluminescence around the boat. Breaking wave crests are lit up like neon signs. Demelza's bow wake throws off a million tiny green sparks. My favourite, as I answer nature's call off the stern, is watching the stardust trail streaming from the rudder like a fighter jet's vapour trail.

Made it through the ITCZ

We made it through the freaky ITCZ (Intertropical Convergence Zone) unscathed, thankfully. We hit it a little further south than predicted, around 8 degrees N and was in it until around 5 30'N, about 2.5 days. It was an interesting experience particularly for Lo after studying this area during her Masters at UBC. We motorsailed for a total of about 24 hrs which was the maximum amount of fuel we wanted to spare on this passage (less than half of our total reserve). The Equatorial Counter Current makes its way east in this area, pushing us in the wrong direction and making our progress rather slow.

While inside the ITCZ, we kept a close eye on a number of dark, very ominous looking clouds nearby with the help of the radar. These potential squalls develop at night when the air temperature cools down relative to the ocean and provides vertical energy and hence, big billowing cumulonimubus clouds that may bring rain and/or strong wind. We were lucky that we just got rain. Big squalls can be quite dangerous with winds over 50 kts arriving in front of them. We watched them on the radar as these massive blobs moved closer and closer (some of them over 10 miles long came within 1 mile), hoping they were the "just rain" type, but lowering and tying down the sails just in case.

More and more rain streamed off the sails that had a hard time catching the variable wind also characteristic of the ITCZ. We actually had SOME wind while motorsailing, which is lucky as the doldrums can leave you with absolutely not a breath of wind. However, the 3-5 kts we did have couldn't make up its mind which direction to come from. So, after we had turned the engine off to try to sail, and had moved the sails around a couple of times in a game of TAG with the wind, the banger went back on.

Thunderstorms are also common in the ITCZ, this meteorologically unstable, unpredictable area of the world where the weather circulation of the northern hemisphere meets the southern and hurricanes often develop. We saw numerous flashes of lightning on the evenings of June 4th and 5th (I only know the dates because i went back into the log book to look them up), luckily again, to the south of us. We never heard thunder, although at the first flash of lightning, Lo was a little overly anxious on her night watch about the nasty repercussions of a lightning strike to the electrical systems on a sailboat, and jumped down inside the cabin, woke up Gary "LIGHTNING, Gar, THERE'S LIGHTNING!", grabbed the GPS and laptop and shoved them in the oven (which was off), the closest thing we have to a faraday box. Phew! There was going to be NO KIDDING AROUND when it came to lightning. Besides, do you have any idea how many days she worked on installing this electrical system?! After an hour or so, she realized that the lightning was probably pretty far off (no thunder... yup, pretty far) and she could likely squeeze out the 3 seconds it took to put them away again if the storm approached. So, out they gingerly came to re-establish our position and tracking. Seems like that conversation we had over lunch about "lightning protocol" didn't go to waste.

The ITCZ is like the equator of the weather world. And after emerging from it, as the winds and swell turned to come from the south for the first time since leaving Vancouver, as the grey and white clouds parted to show some beautiful blue sky and the sun again, as the wind rose and actually decided on and maintained a direction, we felt like we had already crossed into the other hemisphere. Yet, we were still 5.5 degrees north of the geographical half way point. As the Southern Cross gets higher and higher in the night sky, we'll just have to wait another 5 days or so to have that toast to King Neptune.

Routing Strategy

Those of you following our progress on the winlink map (www.winlink.org; our call sign is ve0dlz [victor echo zero delta lima zulu) may have noticed our slight deviation from the direct route to the Marquesas. While we have been known to fly by the seats of our pants, we have a plan. I repeat, we have a plan.

The number one driving factor in getting to our destination is...wind. There are two hurdles that may impede our ability to get enough in the right directions: the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ or doldrums) and the southern trade winds. We expect the former to be about 1 to 3 degrees thick (60 to 180 miles) and sitting at about 10N to 8N. After that, we'll keep going south to hook up with the strong trades. If we head west too early after the ITCZ, we may end up having to fight contrary trade winds to make our intended landfall. That would be like beating your head against a wall for a week...not much fun.

Doldrums

We have hit the ITCZ (doldrums; see recent post on Routing Strategy). We've been making some good time over the last couple of days, with winds typically between 10 and 15 knots. This morning they freshened to 15 to 20 knots and the waves got correspondingly larger. At about 1500, we entered the northern boundary of the ITCZ at just a bit north of 10N. The winds died, clouds erupted into rain showers (we both scrubbed down in the cockpit in saltwater, then rinsed off in the refreshing rain...AHHHHHHH, all clean!), but the persistent swell remained to torment us and constantly rolls us from side to side (it's enough to make you go CRAZY...I'm okay!). This could last a day (if we're really lucky) or a week (please, no; I'll be a good boy).

Boredom, you ask?

What's there to do for a month at sea on a small sailboat? Well, let me describe a typical day�

First, there are the watches. Not those providing time, although there is a variety of those on board (all synchronized to GMT ), but those served to oversee the safe, efficient and continual operation of our vessel. Gary starts out the first formal watch from 10 pm to 3 am when he wakes up Lo and jumps in the bunk for his 5 hours of sleep. That gives Lo the 3:30 am, or 03:30 hr as we call it out here at sea, to 08:00 hr sunrise watch. Depending on her level of energy, Lo either has a nap when Gary gets up or makes breakfast and naps around noon.

During the day, there are all sorts of activities to partake in. There's reading our respective novels, reading the nearly three-week old LA Times newspapers Lo brought, reading the variety of magazines on board, reading informative type books such as the Cruisers Handbook of Fishing, or Mariner's Weather Encyclopedia, or interesting science books such as Healing Gaia. So, that was reading.

Then there are activities such as fishing (caught 2 dorado and a squid so far), bird watching and identification with our field guide, managing the produce that need to be rummaged through for "bad apples" and turned every day or so, cooking, cleaning, baking and eating.

Cleaning takes on a new definition at sea. Gone are the days of leaving the dishes in the dry rack to dry, which would be more like leaving the dishes to FLY. First there is the salt water rinse and wash, then dry with the salt water dish cloth. Then, for metal stuff, a freshwater wipe with a sponge, followed by the dry cycle with the freshwater cloth and putting them away before they fly. Without a watermaker, conservation is a big issue to ensure that we have enough to make it to the Marquesas, and Gary Mann (who relishes the adventure of minimalism and seems to like it when things get uncomfortably hot, dirty, smelly, and cramped [his 6'3" frame is currently tucked into a 6' bunk]) takes this VERY seriously. Our "showers" consist of about 250 ml of water and half a paper towel (believe me, a dedicated wash cloth would last two days in this duty). I guess I'll be appreciating his extremism when we actually have water left in a couple of weeks.

All of this to do, and then there are the necessities such as sail changes, navigation and watching for ships (haven't seen one in over 10 days). Navigation is pretty easy. There is nothing to hit (except for all the other ships that also think there's nothing to hit). Go south. We take a written position in our log every couple of hours and report these daily to the Pacific Seafarers Net and to our radio contact, Ron, in Vancouver who then passes on the info by email to our family. We also contact another sailboat from the Blue Water Cruising Assoc. of which we are members, which coincidentally is about 4 days behind us, also en route to the Marquesas. It's fun to compare notes and discuss daily events...

We download weather data files and faxes daily to stay abreast of what's ahead, especially with respect to the nature of and location of the ITCZ (ie. the doldrums; see "Southbound Strategy" section).

All this and there is hardly time to do your nails! Gary takes his nap from around 6 pm to 8 pm, but is often interrupted by the "Zzzzzzzzzzzzzing!" of the fishing rod, which rouses him from his bunk like a lightning bolt (I've never seen him get up so quickly). So sometimes his nap goes until his watch starts at 10 pm.

On the writing side of things, we both keep journals and write to the blog and emails to maintain the lifeline home with family and friends as much as possible. There is nothing better than a nice letter from home when you're half way through your sleepy night watch in the middle of the ocean. Thanks everyone!

We also have a variety of activities still "in the bank," such as games, art supplies, guitar, beads, Frisbee, and even a hacky sack. Good times ahead, I tell you! Can't wait. This passage could last forever and we wouldn't get bored. Nope, not us. We could just keep on writing and I'll bet that some of you might just keep on reading. You guys bored yet? Not us. Yachtzee anyone? Oh, that's good.