RTW Leg 12: The Pacific (part one)

Santa Cruze, The Galapagos to Nuku Hiva, The Marquesas

Three weeks on the Galapagos and it was time to go. After all, Charlie Darwin only spent two weeks here and he was at full liberty, unconstrained by all the rules, regulations and restrictions now imposed limiting where you can go, what you can see and how you can go about your day, all of which has tempered our overall enjoyment of the place. My new phone was finally delivered and another team of officials came on board Broadsword to inspect, fill in forms and thwak them into submission with heavy rubber stamps and flicks of the pen. It was later than I’d like to have left with just an hour of light remaining, but enough to weigh anchor and weave our way through the parking lot of yachts, cruisers and day trippers, setting course for west heading toward the setting sun.

Lucy "Palin" and her inflatable globe, slightly overwhelmed by it all...

When sailing around the world, the leg from Galapagos to Marquesas is the longest single passage and at a smidgen over 3000 miles is not that much further than crossing the Atlantic. However, what lies ahead is a vastly different prospect to the pond. We will be very much alone and although many yachts are on the same route as us, the rate of departure from Galapagos is about one a day putting 160 odd miles between each boat. We have been going a week now and I have seen just one ship and nothing else. Not even the customary high-altitude airplane streaking across skys pulling is cotton tail behind to a faraway destination to guess at. No other sign of human life at all, save the occasional satellite, made by humans, devoid of life.

There was no wind when we left and we motored south west for 40 hours to 3 degrees south of the equator to find those trades that blow reliably and continuously from east to west, generating a useful current that flows in the same direction at about one knot. Broadsword is now firmly in the grip of the trades, 20 kts of ESE and trotting along nicely with a reef in the main at a healthy eight or nine knots. Our PB 24 hour run was 197 nm on passage from Aruba to San Blas and there’s a steely determination on board to beat that and break the 200 MAD (mile a day) barrier.

I’ve been experimenting with the sails learning what works best depending on wind strength and direction and much to Lucy’s consternation can change sails two or three times a day to suit the variables. The sail wardrobe is a bit like a Swiss Army knife with a different blade for different jobs. Broadsword has a main sail and a jib and this is the principle set up, the main blade of the Swiss Army knife if you like. Broadsword is a cutter equipping her with a second shorter inner forestay for a staysail. When the winds get a bit spicy, we have to reduce sails swapping the larger jib for the smaller staysail. We have a gennaker which is a big light sail, good for moderate winds on the beam and a parasail which I am finding difficult to master but this is flown in light winds from behind on a run. And finally, we have a storm jib which is hanked onto a removable forestay. Lucy quite reasonably never wants to see it up in anger, but it is rather like an insurance policy, you pay the premium, you buy the peace of mind and with careful driving you trust never to make a claim. That’s six sails to choose from covering most bases.

Twin head sails

Lucy and I have found our rhythm and are reconciled to the burden of the nightly watches and the freedom of the days, liberating us from chasing our respective tails in pursuit of a never-ending list of things to do. Our daylight hours are characterized by four activities; eating, sleeping, reading, fixing.

Eating: Eating sounds an incidental activity of necessity however, on a long ocean passage it’s a dominant pre occupation. Endless conversations are had about how much of whatever we have left, when such and such will go off and when we will run out of this, that or the next thing. For example, we bought a dozen “green” avocados but they have ripened at an alarming rate and its now a race to eat them, daily, coming up with ever more imaginative ways to incorporate them into our lunches. Experimentation is fun and we are wondering how our par boiled eggs will fair. Lucy read somewhere that if you boil an egg for ten seconds, it adds a month to its un refrigerated shelf life. Yesterday’s food conversation was on Marmite. Those who know Lucy well, will know of her obsession with Marmite and she is, carelessly, now down to her last jar: Can we DHL one? No, too expensive. Can our next guest bring one? Yes, but too late. Can we buy one from a shop in Nuka Hiva? Don’t be ridiculous. We agreed that the best resolution would be found by writing to Marmite UK Inc and explaining the predicament and rely on their charitable nature to send a small consignment to Tahiti, for example.

Nothing like some firm buns to keep your pecker up. Home made yoghurt another regular feature .

Sleeping: Shorthanded long haul ocean passages are tiring and you get ground down by three-hour watches. We both theoretically have six hours of sleep, two three hour off watches which sounds like enough. But it inevitably takes time to get to sleep and one is frequently woken by a crash or a bang or a wallop. And even when sleep does take you, it’s not deep, restful and regenerative, rather its intermittent, shallow and insufficient. Inevitably during the day, one has to catch up with plenty of naps. Lucy is an expert in “nananapping” as she calls it, and were it a sport, she would surely be the Chris Hoy of nananapping, multiple gold medal winner with an appointment with the Queen to collect her damehood waiting in the wings.

Another nananap. There's simply not enough hours in the day for eye lid inspection

Fixing: One of the reasons we bought a new boat and not a second hand one (or as they say in Morningside “prrre oooned”), was the expectation that we would have a honeymoon period of around two years during which time everything would work well and as it should. This is not because I am lazy, but because I’m not good at fixing stuff. At home, if something doesn’t work, lets say the washing machine, I call a plumber and he comes and fixes or condemns it. My notion that there would be a glorious trouble-free period during which time everything would work as advertised showed me to be as naïve and ill-informed as Grand Britannia entering the Eurovision Song Contest to win it. Every day is a fixing day and I now have adopted the daily Deck Check to try and limit the breakages. I walk the deck and scrutinize every little thingy for wear or tear so it can be fixed before it pops. Chafing is the biggest enemy, and we are not talking the sweaty rubbings of the inner thighs. The constant pitching and rolling motion causes everything to rub, and the friction erodes the fabric till it snaps, sometimes catastrophically. The Deck Check aims to spot it and cut it off at the pass. Yesterday alone, the fixes include: Chafed gennaker halyard, shelf in wardrobe shouldered by Lucy when thrown against it (not by me), 19mm nut fell of the goose neck of the boom. The 19mm nut was a biggy. It held a pin in place and without the nut, the pin would have worked loose and the boom would have collapsed.

Gennakar Halyard : the green outer sheaf chafed through and the white inner core ready to go

Reading: We have a TV in our saloon and hard drive packed with Harvey’s dodgey films. I don’t mean dodgey in the sense of the type of film you can’t watch with your children. Let’s just say I don’t think he paid a fair market price for them, and by extension, nor did I. And yet we have not watched a flicker of TV since leaving the UK in January. This is good. Much of preparing for an ocean passage is the vital task of replenishing your Kindle. This is as important as putting diesel in the tank before casting off. The words in the Kindle is as fuel for the brain as diesel is for your engine. Without books on a boat, your mind is adrift at sea. Those that argue the merits of real paper books versus a Kindle soon realise that on a boat there really is no other option. One consumes books at such a ferocious rate that you would need to be on a Maersk container ship to store them all. Our Kindles are our Maersk, packed to the rafters with books for the passage. This week I have read Close to the Wind by Pete Goss; inspiring. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart; brutal. And Mischief in Patagonia by Bill Tilman; eccentric. As a current affairs crackhead, I do miss reading the Times every morning. We are in a news void and Lucy and I speculate to each other how the big news items have evolved since departure. Is Marie Le Pen the new French President? Will Johnson survive? And what next for those poor brave Ukranians.

On Thursday we received bad and sad news. Fellow yacht, Blue Beryle, with a young Dutch couple Alex and Yvette were dismasted. At the time, they were 500 miles in front of us so little we could do other than send an email of encouragement and support. The resourceful couple constructed a jury rig from their spinnaker pole and storm jib and are managing to make way at an impressive 4 knots but it will take them a further 25 days to make landfall. Yvette has not has not enjoyed this at all, and who can blame her, being new to sailing and crossing an ocean taking her far beyond her comfort zone. Lucy has, typical of her nature, befriended her by email providing her with much needed emotional support and encouragement to give an all-important third party leg up to help get her through the daily fears and challenges. Her gratitude to Lucy’s entreaties has been deep and emotional. Lucy and I are resolved to try and catch Blue Beryle but the winds are pushing us south of their track.

Haircutting adding a welcome distraction. Wait for a windy day and the detritus is conveniently blown overboard

Fishing as been a source of immense frustration. My fishing experience has been limited to gaffing salmon on Almond River at school which we enjoyed as good sport while our headmaster took a divergent view regarding it as poaching, punishable by a good beating. I’ve had occasional boy hood success with feathers and mackerel but other than that, of late the closest I’ve come to a fish has been in a restaurant. Undeterred, I bought a rod, a reel and some tackle and sought advice from others who seemed to know what they were doing. We are now in the middle of the Pacific and all we’ve caught is our daily harvest of kamikaze flying fish and squid on our side decks. How difficult can it be? Salt was firmly rubbed into my gaping wounds by our new friends Nick and Sophie who sent an email last night boasting they had caught a Sailfish taller than Sophie, and before you ask, whilst diminutive, Sophie is certainly no midget. I’ll keep plugging away, hooks are in the water, and you will be the first to know when we land a whopper.

Captains Log: Sea Date Friday 29th May 2022, day 9, 1,543 nautical miles run. Position; 6°08’ south 113°010’ west. HALF WAY.

Half way has been celebrated in style with a beef curry and a bottle of wine. Just another 1,500 odd miles and ten days to go! I think we are feeling pretty good about it, the weather has been kind, Broadsword is sailing well, the food is good and the crew are in the groove.

Another cracking sunset. Spot the dolphin?

There is so much to say that it would be tedious to burden you, poor reader, with an overly long account. Therefore, look forward to Part Deu posted in a week. In the meantime, you might muse over the likelihood of Lucy dooin me in and throwing me overboard. Thoroughly fed up with my irritating optimism and ill placed positivity while driven to distraction by my disinclination to see the down side and aghast at how my well-meaning attempts to cheer her up when down consist of tickling her very sensitive feet. I suspect the only remaining question is not “If?”, rather “When?”. Lucy is showing an unhealthy interest in how to sail the boat!