Lat: 4 40.984′ S
Lon: 109 44.970′ W

1770 miles to go…

We’re now more than 1000 miles from the Galapagos to the east, Easter Island to the south, the Marquesas to the west, and Mexico to the north. There is Clipperton Island, a small, uninhabited atoll owned by France just under 1000 miles to the north, but another day or two and it will be outside the 1000 mile radius as well. The Pacific is massive. It covers nearly a third of the Earth’s surface — more than all of the lands masses combined. We’ve just barely started our trek across it.

We have had some boat adventures since the last blog. The sat phone is still acting up. The main halyard chafed through again, this time at the external block I added. Going up the stick at sea is really not fun, and I think we’ll be fine without it the rest of the way so it will probably stay like that. We shouldn’t have wind forward of the beam (wind will always be from the side to dead behind us), so we should do just fine with the spinnaker. When we get to the Marquesas I think I’m going to try my hand at splicing a wire rope into the halyard so that the last few feet of the halyard will be wire and much more protected from chafe. Calder’s book says to leave this to professionals, but Don Casey’s book has great instructions on how to do it and a halyard isn’t a safety-related item as long as you aren’t using it to go up the stick, which brings me to another digression. After seeing the condition of some of the halyards after several thousand sea miles and having a couple of them chafe through, I think I’m going to start using a “known good halyard” for going up the stick. This is something our rigger in Ft. Pierce often did and I have a brand new backup halyard as well as some older ones that are in good shape. We’ll see.

Our next adventure was having the dinghy come loose on my watch at 6am. The shackle holding the bow to the davits wore and then broke through, dragging the dinghy at 7+ knots though the wake, with only the stern attached to the boat. Without stopping the boat, this was a two-person job so I woke Wes up. He used a boat hook to grab the dinghy and hold the bow clear of the water while i secured the bow to the davits with a temporary line. He went back to make use of his last 30 minutes of sleep before taking over and I rigged a new shackle and eventually got things back to normal.

And our final adventure: The smell of fiberglassing resin leads to a sticky afternoon. Wes picked up a gallon of resin in Key West to glass a patch of the keel, and the smell of it in the tool berth had gotten even stronger than usual the last couple of days. This afternoon, Lauren noticed that it had started leaking and had gotten onto a number of things. Luckily, we keep a tarp down under the tools and spare parts, so the cushions in the berth weren’t ruined, but we went through a fair amount of acetone cleaning things up and ended up tossing a couple of things. Anybody who’s worked with fiberglass resin knows how much fun that is.

Aside from these few minor adventures, however, the sailing has been great. We’re averaging 6-7+ knots with just the spinnaker up and things are very comfortable. The days are mostly sunny to party cloudy and the temperature is nice, with a slight warming trend lately. Virtually all of our logs since we left the Galapagos have recorded between 77 and 81 degrees Fahrenheit, but the last couple days it has gotten into the mid-80’s inside the salon (though it’s still very nice outside). The weather reminds me of the great fall days back on Galveston Bay where we learned to sail.

Our celebration of the local holiday yesterday was great. We had our now-traditional passage celebration meal: breaded & fried veggie scallops, rosemary & garlic potatoes roasted in olive oil, and green beans. MMMMmmmm. I don’t think we mentioned it before, but you can buy 1 liter boxes of “Clos” wine in Panama for $2 and it’s actually workable for a table wine. Boxes are better than bottles on a boat anyway. More than one boat we know left Panama with caches of Clos measured by the case.

We’ve fallen into a bit of a routine when things aren’t breaking — sleeping, eating, reading, dishes, boat projects, conversation, etc. but we do find ourselves looking forward to the blog & e-mail portions of our day.

As we approach the middle of what should be our longest passage, I’m trying to get the whole crew to take a crack at writing a little bit on “What’s it like to be on a small boat in the middle of the ocean?” We will post the submissions if they appear, so stay tuned…