Ron
05/26/2012, Halfway between Hawaii and SF

We're just about halfway home. Our trusty motor has been very helpful. We still don't believe the propeller is pitched right, but at least we're plugging away at 4+ knots through the water. We are very close to our originally planned courseline. The high seems to be moving south; we seem to be crossing the high now. That means really calm seas (no wind waves, just perhaps 2 feet of swell) and this looks very odd for the middle of the ocean. We are seeing quite a few floating trap balls of various colors: some white, some black, some orange. Probably these are from crab or lobster traps that broke off and are now just spinning around the gyre. Sean tried to pick one up but it was too heavy. He kept saying something or other about a treasure, but I couldn't understand him.

Any moment we are waiting for the wind to pick up. We aren't watching the weather very closely any more because we aren't likely to change course based on the weather. Sean says the only rule on the boat is to not wish for more wind. So Scott and I are hoping for more wind. Yes, it's a technicality, but we're engineers!

Some of you have asked why we are heading so far north. There are two reasons: First, the "great circle" route, the shortest distance between two points, is, in the Northern Hemisphere, going to take you a bit north. Second, the "pacific high", a summertime stationary high pressure system, rotates clockwise. We want to get over that to give us winds that are favorable. We have a lot of fuel, but not enough to motor the whole way, so we rely on average winds this month. Usually, where we are right now, there are winds from the east. We'll be heading northeast for another few days before we make our final turn toward SF.

Movie night is still our most talked about subject. The good news is that we are all getting along really well. The weather is just starting to turn cooler. Sean has the whole cockpit enclosed with canvas and screen. The air is about 60 degrees but it's a toasty 72 or so in the cockpit, and with the engine running it's still in the upper 70s down below.

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Ron
05/24/2012, Middle of the Pacific Ocean

The engine problems got worse last night, and we weren't able to motor much last night. We needed to as well, as we are crossing a wind transition zone where the winds should be pushing us the right direction soon. So, we made some progress yesterday and last night, but not much. We have turned east for the most part!

We were too tired last night for a blog. We're all pretty tired right now too. Our night shifts are much more work when there is little wind and a quirky engine.

AND NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS!!

This morning, Scott did a "process of elimination" testing of the engine and we have identified the source of the problem as the electric priming pump! We are currently bypassing this priming pump (we can bleed the system by hand) and the engine is now working! We are almost to the point where we should start seeing enough wind where we won't need the engine, but the high is still pretty far north for this time of year. If it moves south, we will make some good progress.

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Ron
05/23/2012, Middle of the Pacific Ocean

The engine is still giving us trouble, but we have a few reasonable workarounds. They aren't GOOD workarounds and so I think Sean decided to raise the priority of this ticket to "High". Sean and Scott, with a little of my help, ripped apart most of the fuel systems of the engine today looking for the cause of our fuel starvation problem. No luck yet. We have some fresh ideas for tomorrow, though. And, because we had decent wind all day, we made good progress even without the motor. Me, I'm definitely more on the electronics side, so I got to observe more than anything else. And supervise, although they didn't realize I was doing that!

Today was shower day. One of the steps in getting the shower ready is to cover the binnacle, basically the instrument panel in front of the steering wheel, because we shower right behind there. I asked where the binnacle cover was, and Sean told me it was in the lazarette "on top". So, trusting Sean, I took out the cover on top, and assumed it was the binnacle cover, only to find it was the main sail cover. It didn't fit very well. Sean said I had to blog about this. Can you believe the mistake he made? :-)

Because we did so much sailing over the past few days, we are back to babying the generator today as well. As Sean says, everything is "just barely working", and the generator is no exception. Nothing is easy it seems. But we're cranking 90 amps into our system as I type.

We have another few days of northeast travel, then we are supposed to turn east. Once we do, the winds are supposed to be behind us, and we should really get some speed. We're all a little nervous about the forecast, but with some luck we will start making some good time once above the pacific high.

Last night's movie was "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly". I was good. I'll let you guess who was bad and who was ugly from the remaining two candidates.

For food today, we ate english muffins with cream cheese and/or PB (thanks to Scott), turkey burgers (me), and Sean is preparing his specialty "Seanage Sausage" for dinner, which is some kind of rice dish. He keeps mumbling something about the sausage being frozen, so I'm getting worried! At least we're able to cook every meal because the ocean is actually pretty calm.

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