Moku pe'a Report

I apologize that we didn't get a post in on Saturday. We had problems
with the sat phone connection and I couldn't tell if the post went through
or not. To keep things in sequence, what follows are the posts for
Saturday, Sunday (a repeat), and today.

3 May 0600 position 8-06N 157-06W. Day's run 123 miles.

All day the wind gradually died down and backed to the North forcing us to
head up to keep the boat moving. By midnight the wind was down to 6 knots
from the NNE. It was very pleasant sailing, but we were heading 30
degrees to the East of Christmas Island, and boat speed was below 5 knots.
Fortunately, after midnight the wind started clocking and increasing and
we are now heading straight for Christmas again doing 7+ knots in about 10
knots of breeze. The forecast says that we are supposed to have 18 knots
of wind from the ENE tomorrow. We'll see. We also seem to have avoided
any ITCZ effects, at least so far. This is typically the latitude where
we would encounter the ITCZ if it is active. We see lots of confused
vertical cloud development, which is typical of the ITCZ, but so far it
doesn't appear to be affecting the wind, and we haven't had any rain or
lightning.

It is getting a lot warmer now. No more sweatshirts at night, and we are
trying to find ways to keep air circulating in the boat without risking
letting sea water in. When the wind and sea are down we are opening the
dodger window and ports on the leeward side of the boat. We've got the
shades on the hatches pulled to help keep the boat cooler during the day.

We saw a lot more bird action today with a few groups of boobies coming by
to check out the boat and the lures dragging behind us. We had 3 bird
strikes on the lures. The boobies would do a couple of fly bys before one
of them dives into the water and grabs the lure. The "snap" of the
clothes pin as the line goes taught gets my attention and causes my heart
to race for a second until I realize that it is a bird and not a fish.
Then the pull gets to be too great and the lure is jerked from the bird's
beak. He squawks a protest, shakes his head in disgust, and takes off
flying. I believe that each bird strike today was a different bird, but
boobies are incredibly stupid animals. I've seen a booby dive repeatedly
on my lures for what seems like hours. Each time the lure was pulled from
his beak until finally he hit it just right, the hook set, and he was
dragging behind the boat in the water. I pulled him in, managed to get
the hook removed without hurting the bird or myself, and threw him back
in the water. He sat there for a few seconds regrouping, then took off
and proceeded to start diving again on the lures.

At 1700 we decided on a spaghetti dinner and I was fully involved in
preparation when Rocky yelled that we had a fish on. We put the cooking
on hold, landed the fish (a nice 20 pound aku), cleaned up the bloody
mess, and got back to cooking. The last thing we needed was a fish right
then, particularly since we were committed to a different dinner. Note to
self: Pull in the fish lines before starting dinner. So we rushed
through dinner and cleaned the fish before it got dark. It'll be fresh
aku for dinner tomorrow night. The fish was caught on the same Fred
Morelli special lure that won the Molokai cruise fishing tournament in
January. Thanks Freddie!

I was sitting in the cockpit at 0200 this morning enjoying my daily cup of
coffee when a school of dolphin stopped by for a visit. It was pitch
black out so I couldn't see them, but they were so close you could hear
the quick rush of air as each took a breath and the sounds of their
splashes as they jumped around the boat. We are definitely entering an
area of more sea life. Still no fishing boats though.

4 May 0600 position 5-35N 157-23W. Day's run 151 miles

At 0600 I was just getting ready to wake Rocky to go on watch when a
squall hit. We quickly progressed from 6 knots of wind and full sail to
one reef in the main, then one in the jib, then a second reef in the main.
When things settled and the squall cleared it was blowing 18 knots from
the ENE, just like the grib files called for today. But it didn't stop
there. The wind continued to build into the early afternoon and by 1400
we had 3 reefs in the main and jib. It was probably blowing just under 30
knots. Now this is the North Pacific Ocean that I remember…

It got very bumpy during the evening and stayed that way. Rocky says it
feels like we are riding a bronco. My guess is we are in the equatorial
counter current which sets to the East and would make the seas lumpy. The
wind backed off to the high teens during the night, but boat speed stayed
over 6 knots so we left the third reef in the main and just unrolled a bit
of jib.

I should have known that praising the reliability of the sat phone the
other day would be a mistake. This morning we had a funky connection.
Some emails went out and some came in, but the software says the blog post
didn't transmit. Rocky suggested trying again, but I'm not going to get
sucked into that game again. Kara and I often gave it "just one more try"
on our 2011 cruise and once ended up with a $30 phone bill for the day and
the same problem when we were done. I remember Lori's comment the
following day, "How come you sent me the same email eight times?" Turns
out the email was sent, but it didn't register as sent on my laptop
software. So if you didn't see a blog post yesterday, Lori will let me
know and I'll resend yesterday's post tomorrow.

I'll probably jinx this too by talking about it, but I believe we have
left the ITCZ behind us. The skies are organized and mostly clear now.
There's lightning out there somewhere though. Every once in a while a
flash off in the distance lights the sky a bit. Hard to tell where it's
coming from, hopefully behind us. Not bad at all, just one big squall and
wind all the way through.

Rocky and I rehashed procedures for man overboard the other day. He said
his biggest fear is coming up on deck and finding that he is the only one
on the boat. It's my biggest fear too, not because I can't handle the
boat alone, but because my crew mate in the water has absolutely zero
chance of survival unless I do absolutely everything perfectly to effect
his recovery. Key is marking the position where you discovered him
missing, and then retracing your path exactly until you find him. We lost
a man overboard in the '87 Transpac on Merlin. We were going 15 knots at
the time with the spinnaker up, and as Murphy's Law dictates, everything
went wrong in trying to get the spinnaker and staysail down so we could go
back to pick him up. By the time we got the boat under control and turned
around, our man in the water was out of sight, and it was my job as the
navigator to find him. Terrifying. But we found him and the story had a
happy ending.

It is looking like an arrival at Christmas Island late tomorrow or Tuesday
morning. The forecast is calling for decreasing winds but we're hopeful
that they won't drop enough to slow us down.

5 May 0600 position 3-24N 157-22W. Day's run 131 miles. 85 miles to
Christmas Island

The word of the morning was "squalls". They were all around us marching
along with the wind, but if one got close enough then the wind increased
from its usual 12 knots to over 20 knots. We left a double reef in the
mainsail, which was fine for the heavy stuff, but it left us a bit under
powered in the lighter air. Jib size was easier to adjust. In 12 knots
it was fully unrolled, or close to it, and when the squalls hit we fell
off to near DDW long enough to roll the jib up with a double reef which we
shook out after the squall passed.

Fortunately the squalls ended at noon, and for the next eighteen hours
we've enjoyed lovely broad reaching in winds that slowly dropped from 12
to 6 knots. In the wee hours of the morning the wind has become so light
that we've had to reach up to keep from slatting and we are now sailing 30
degrees above the direct line course to Christmas Island.

Bravura only spent 10 days in Tahiti after winning the Transpac race to
there in '76. We had to get up to Honolulu for the "Round the State" race
that August and couldn't afford any more time in French Polynesia. The
custom built boat had been launched just a few days before the Tahiti race
started, and as you can imagine there were a number of new boat "bugs"
that we discovered during the race. One of them was that the head would
clog approximately every third use, and the "you clog it you clean it"
rule was in effect. Not me, thank you. I used the bow pulpit for my
business the entire race. We found another new boat bug a day out of
Tahiti on the way to Hawaii. One of the engine hydraulic drive hoses
started leaking where it passed through a bulkhead and we lost all of our
hydraulic fluid. We patched the hole but didn't have enough spare fluid
to refill the system. What to do… Turns out we did have a whole lot of
Wesson Oil aboard. We filled the system with it, and it worked, but we
figured prolonged use would likely damage something so we saved our engine
for motoring into the Ala Wai, and sailed all the way to Hawaii. As
Murphy's Law dictates, because we didn't have an engine we also didn't
have much wind and it was a long slow trip. We sailed right by Christmas
Island one afternoon. I could see it in the distance but we couldn't take
the time to stop because of our deadline in Honolulu. We made it to
Honolulu with 2 days to spare before the Round the State race, and the
engine worked fine entering the harbour, but we joked on the boat that we
must have smelled like a MacDonald's deep fryer.

I've been looking forward to visiting Christmas Island ever since I first
saw it on the horizon 38 years ago. Unfortunately, it's not looking like
we are going to make it into Christmas before dark today due to the slow
going.