Day 1
Our first day at sea is painfully slow. What little wind there is comes from straight ahead, and the current is retarding our speed by a knot and a half. We motor sail for the entire day, with only a brief stop to go for a swim – predictably, the boat is fouled again, so we scrub tiny barnacles and dense algal tufts off for half an hour, hoping to increase our speed. A beautiful kissy-fish (Lukie’s term, some sort of surgeon fish lookalike) hangs upside down just under us, no doubt hoping we’ll protect it against predators. It is an eerie feeling swimming in water that is deeper than 1000 metres; when looking down all we see is endless blue, the sun’s rays disappearing below us. Whatever monsters are lurking leave us alone however, and we climb back onboard unscathed, soon resuming our slow progress.
Day 2
On our second night we have a pleasant night motor where we’re joined by about ten ‘ghost gulls’ – the nocturnal Galapagos swallow tailed gulls – who fly eagerly alongside the boat, glowing eerily in the green starboard light. They make a strange creaking, clicking kind of noise and we wonder how they manage to hunt in the thick darkness, and also where they spend their days – do they sit and sleep on the water surface, or do they fly all the way back to land? (Not that we’we managed to move more than about 140 miles in a day and a half, but still).
The doldrums continue on our second day, and we stick to motoring apart from a brief break when David discovers we’ve used far more fuel than he anticipated, after which he resolutely switches off the engine. So we go for a swim, next to a curious turtle who seems to be hunting the tiny fish that hang around our prop. Once we get back on the boat we sit bobbing up and down, making total speed of about a knot thanks to a favourable current switch. Predictably, after about half an hour of this, the engine goes back on – not moving at all is unlikely to get us to the wind, and we really need to get moving by wind soon. It looks like we’ve missed the convection zone – we can see the clouds and lightning in the distance but we haven’t managed to get in front of it where the wind will be as we were hoping.
David is frustrated, he hates slow sailing, and the rest of us mentally count through our food reserves, reassuring ourselves that we can definitely last a month or longer if we have to. The kids are bored and bicker a lot, so we play endless games of cards, board games and read Harry Potter until my voice gets hoarse.
Day 3
On our third day we finally get some wind as we catch up with the convection zone. When my night watch starts at 4 am I switch off the engine and go along at 5 to 6 knots. The moon has gone down, the night is black and the ghost gulls fly calmly alongside, creaking quietly to one another as we sail away from the tranquil sunrise. We are able to sail the whole day, which is just as well because we are running low on fuel and will have to reserve what is left for charging batteries, maneuvering in bad weather and the like.
When making lunch we check the fridge and realise that several vegetables are about to go off – the fridge works fine, but because the cooling unit is inside, a lot of moisture gathers, and wet carrots don’t tend to last. The green tomatoes we had hidden away in a cabin hoping they were going to last for weeks all seem to be ripening rapidly, so we gorge ourselves on bruschetta for lunch. When we fail to land a hooked fish a while later I am almost relieved – we need to eat the cauliflower and a fish could wreck my cauliflower and potato curry plans…
At the end of Day 3 we have travelled about 340 miles.
Day 4
By the end of Day 3 the steady wind is replaced by patches of rain. On my night watch lightning illuminates the sky ahead, and suddenly we’re in the middle of a raincloud – shifty winds and a bucket of rain, followed by windy patches and more rain. At least we’re moving, and after lunch the weather clears up, settling into what could be the edge of the trades – steady winds that see us moving steadily along our course. At the end of Day 4 we’ve gone about 420 miles.
Day 5
The days are starting to blur into one another, with people asking ‘is it Saturday? How long have we been gone?’ Only the kids and I know it’s not; we homeschool Monday to Friday and so have a better grasp of time than the others. We are in the proper trades now, and moving swiftly – at the end of Day 5 we’ve covered 570 miles. Sarah and Steve have been a bit under the weather, we suspect it is a mild version of a bug that started with Matias back in Isabella (requiring a lot of urgent washing at the time), and which David had just before we set off from Santa Cruz. We bought lots of hospital grade alcohol before leaving, and are now using it liberally to wipe down surfaces, although I suspect there are no more people to infect, Lukie and I probably having been exposed already. (On April’s Fool Day the kids kept playing jokes on David like: ‘Daddy, I’m really sorry, I had a bad tummy and pooped all over your bed, some hit the wall’, enjoying watching his face sink before they collapsed into giggles, yelling ‘April’s Fool!’ – oh the joys of childish humour…).
Day 5 is Pirate Day and David and the kids decorate themselves with painted on scars, bleeding wounds and tattoos and make cutlasses, compasses and sextants out of cardboard. Lukie even invents a Pointer, a device that shows us where to go, which sounds useful, especially as Matias seems to think we should be heading East.
The GPS shows a time change after lunch, and we adjust our clocks accordingly – we certainly notice we are moving west, the sun rising later each day, and it is satisfying to see it reflected in real time.
Day 6
We keep flying through Day 6, steady winds interrupted by occasional showers. The seas are a bit bigger than earlier and we have to close all hatches which creates a stuffy, hot atmosphere indoors. The only hatches open are those in the heads; it doesn’t matter if water gets in there. The bow keeps crashing into the waves, and water pours into the heads, but we need some fresh air to sleep.
We catch a skipjack tuna in the morning, Steve managing to net it expertly before he’s even had breakfast. We have a bit for lunch and it is delicious – just as well, given there’s enough of it to feed us for three days…
Much of the rest of the day is spent with me reading Harry Potter, Steve and the kids curled up next to me, wide-eyed and enthralled. The kids use pencils as wands as they cast spells on each other, Lukie swiftly killing a unicorn and eating its heart – he has obviously crossed over to the Dark Side already.
At the end of Day 6 we’ve travelled 755 miles
Day 7
One week gone, and quite fast at that. It is funny how quickly you get used to being on passage, how easily we enter the routine. We’ve organised the nights so that David does the first watch, from 8 pm to midnight. Sarah and Steve take turns doing the dog watch, from midnight to 4 am, and I do from 4 to 8 am, home schooling the children from after breakfast (they wake up around 6) to about 8 am when everyone else gets up. The midnight watch is the hardest, hence why we’ve got two people sharing it – that way they can each get a full night’s sleep on alternate days.
It seems to work although it isn’t easy to sleep before and after watch, in the hot, stuffy cabins, vibrating as the boat surfs down the waves, loud bangs and crashes as we slam into the sea. We are all tired, that queasy, hungover kind of feeling that arises from a mixture of sleep deprivation and motion sickness, but we mostly manage to nap a bit during the day to make up.
The general tiredness leads to a slight unravelling. During night watch, Sarah sees a shape slither across the cockpit through a corner of her eye. At first, she thinks it’s a rat, but then when it appears elongated she becomes convincd it is a marine iguana the kids have smuggled on board. She is busy trying to figure out how to deal with the Marquesan authorities about the smuggling of endangered species when it occurs to her to catch it before it enters her and Steve’s cabin through the cockpit hatch – which is when she realises it is in fact a flying fish.
Steve, on the other hand, is having weird and lucid dreams. In the latest, he dreams that he has just spent his life savings on a boat. This boat, a ‘Spewman 38’, is everything the name implies, managing to roll insanely even on calm anchorages, and he wakes feeling terrible that he has wasted all his money on a dud of a boat. The only upshot, apparently, was that it came complete with a patio, barbecue, jacuzzi and pizza oven built in.
Which leaves me wondering what we’ll be like after two more weeks – chilled and at one with the immense ocean we’re crossing, or completely barking mad…
At the end of Day 7 we have done 950 miles on the log, 970 over the ground or 2070 miles to go (GPS reading).
SV Bob The Cat 