Part II – The routine.
21 May 2012 | at sea
A little of everything
It only took a couple of days before the at-sea routine seemed like something that had always existed and would never end. We did three-hour watches, ‘hot-bunking’ most of the time in the starboard settee. It went like this: wake up, stagger and clutch your way forward to the head, where you brace yourself carefully, then groggily pull on clothes (optional but since the cockpit seats are pretty salty, probably a good idea) and flop into the cockpit. Hold on. Make sure we’re still going the right way (thanks to Hand of Bruce, the Monitor wind steering gear). Wait three hours and push your sweetie mercilessly out of the bunk and dive in. Repeat for eternity. As it got hotter, we added the changing of the sheets, so that we didn’t have to lie in each others’ sweat, only our own, slightly less clammy sheet which aired out briefly.
Sometimes Mike would mix things up and appear blinking and confused in the companionway just an hour after he’d gone off watch – he was sent back down but this behaviour continued throughout the trip. When he’s on, he’s on and when he’s off, he’s still on. Marni NEVER did this but instead ‘slept like a banshee.’
Usually we would both be awake for the afternoon and early evening. And we read a lot. The e-reader has now run for many hours and probably half the paper library has been gobbled up. Mike’s favorite read: 2001 a Space Odyssey. Marni’s favorite: a creepy tearjerker, Never let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Every day at 0200 UTC we tuned in to the Pacific Puddle Jump net, made up of many boats traveling from Mexico to the Marquesas. This was a great way to talk with other humans and hear how everyone else’s trip was going, what kind of weather they had, et cetera. Afterwards, we would switch up to the Ham (amateur radio) frequency 14.300 mhz at 0300 UTC and check in with them, and they plotted our position on the Yotreps web site. This is really an amazing network of people with monster radio signals who between them can hear pretty much anyone in the Pacific. It is really reassuring to know that they are there every day and that if you have a problem they’re there for you.
We were happily ticking off the miles for eleven days, moving along at an average of 5-1/2 knots, until we reached the dreaded Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) at about latitude 8 degrees north on April 20.