07/15/2011, Oak Harbor Marina
Greetings! We have arrived! And safely, too! We got back yesterday around 1400. But before I share with you some thoughts about the passage and returning home, I first need to take care of some housekeeping.
About a week out of Hawaii the monitor on the ship's computer went on the blink. That effectively cut out communication because I didn't have a screen for writing emails, or for downloading grib files, or uploading blogs..
Some of you were concerned about the lack of comm., and I appreciate your concern. I am not sure about those two scallywags - Janders and Combie, though. I suspect Janders was hoping he could score my Hobie gear while I am not sure what Bob's line was. As for Ruth, she already had cashed in the life insurance policy and spent half of the proceeds! So we'll be having a garage sale shortly to try to repay the insurance company!
In the meantime, I am posting a few blogs I wrote enroute but could not post. They are dated July 7, 9, and 10. I have another blog written for the period from the tenth to when we arrived. But I will wait a day or two to post that to give y'all a chance to play catch up on the other blogs.
Thanks, again, for your concerns - it is quite comforting to know. It is good to be home. I'll share with you the rest of our travels and travails in the next day or two.
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Comments [7]
Glad to hear your return voyage was safe.
07/10/2011, 350 nm off Cape Flattery
As the song goes "I wish I were....". Well, it is starting to look like we are (finally) homeward bound. We hooked into the northwesterly trades we had been looking for. At 15k on a beam reach, we have been putting on some major miles the past couple of days - 160 nm the day before yesterday; 148 nm yesterday; and 145 nm today.
How quickly things can change out here. Why it wasn't so long ago - about 4 days ago when we logged 92 nm - that I was lamenting the fact that it would take us forever to get home. That is because we take the immediate situation and project it out ad infinitum as if nothing will ever change. But, of course, that is foolhardy because the only consistency to life is its inconsistency! And so now our projected arrival date has gone from Monday of next week to possibly Wednesday of this week! I am not a betting man, and I am glad I am not. This stuff would drive me wild(er)!!!
It is bitterly cold here, though. The water temperature is a bone-chilling 55 degrees and the air temperature, with chill factor, is decidedly cooler than that. Jim and I take our watches with everything we own on. Last night I put the watch cap away in favor of a balaclava. A balaclava! Imagine that! This sucks!! As soon as we get off watch we hurriedly slip under the blankets to warm up our digits and body.
The cockpit seats are usually wet rendering them useless for 'enjoying' the ride outside....as if you would want to! So the guy on watch sits at the top of the gangway steps, under the dodger, with the hatch closed to keep what little heat there may be in the cabin. It isn't a whole lot of fun. I much prefer the warmer climes!! Besides eating, the only other activity we can pursue is reading novels. So we spend our days chewing through hero novels and looking at the handheld GPS to tell us how much further. We have been counting down the miles and early this morning we crossed into the 300's, and later today we hope/expect to cross into the 200's.
But just a few hours ago the NWesterly started to lighten up. So maybe we won't get there by Wed. after all. But at least we should be able to make it before Race Weed starts, which will give me some much-needed time to rest up from this 2-month odyssey. But, hey - we still have 350 nm to go and this passage has (re)taught me one thing - don't plan on anything and that way your plan's won't get ruined!!
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07/09/2011
Boy, the difference a day can make out here!! One day I am down in the dumps after recording a whopping 92 nm (it turned out to actually be 120 nm, (but that is another story for another time) and wondering if I will even be back in time to crew on J's boat for Whidbey Island Race Week. The next day we are logging 160 nm and we are looking sss-aaa-ww-eeee-tttt!!!!
Jim and I were moping along the night before last - at one point we logged a meager 2 nm for the hour -- wondering when we might be able to hook into the westerly trades. There is a dense, dense cloud cover throughout the sky for as far as you can see, and it just looks like crap. Then around 0600 in the morning a 15k easterly fills in! An easterly? Wassup with that??? We didn't ask the question too long. We sheeted in and were on our way.
Over the course of the day it gradually swung around to an 18k SWesterly and we were logging some real miles!! But we knew that at some point we had to pay the piper when the westerly filled in. We were wondering how all of that was going to go down? Were we gonna be stuck wallowing in doldrums? Would the wind continue to clock?
As it turned out, Jim had to motor for about an hour to jump from the southerly to the westerly. But now we are 'hooked in' with 500 nm to the Straits of Juan de Fuca. This looks to be real, and we expect this breeze to hold all the way. Guess we'll see!
So now instead of thinking we might arrive on a Tuesday after 24 days, it looks like we might make it next Thursday after only 19 days. Boy, what a difference a day makes! But it is like that out here on the ocean - things can change very rapidly. Here is hoping (and praying) this westerly holds for us!
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07/07/2011, Somewhere out in the Big Pond
What a last couple of days it has been! But not in the way you might think. This time instead of having too much wind and sea we had too LILTTLE wind! That's right. We found ourselves staring at our fuel gauge wondering how much we really had in the tank and just how far it would take us and, more importantly, when the weather might change.
We found ourselves on Tues. and Wed. with a consistent 7k - hardly enough to give a fully-burdened, liveaboard boat like Time Warp any traction through the water. I mean, let's face it - at 3k you just aren't gonna cross the Pacific Ocean in any record-setting time!! Plus I had committed to racing on J's boat (Bodacious) at Whidbey Island Race Week and the pressure of possibly missing that while camped out in the middle of a big pond was most annoying. The problem was further exacerbated when the ship's computer had the hiccups which effectively cut us off from getting weather forecasts or emails from Will advising us on where to go.
And so it was that Jim and I found ourselves discussing our options and strategies for best managing the dwindling petrochemical resource that might help us escape the high pressure that had camped on us. It was a fairly agonizing 48 hours, full of twenty minute bursts to the next wind puff before shutting the engine down.
Finally last night, in a fit of frustration, I furled the jib, pointed the boat towards the barn, and gave the engine half throttle in a vain attempt appease my growing anxiousness and to also conserve fuel. Well, God answers prayers. Because after motoring half the night we found ourselves motoring this morning into a 15k easterly! Now an easterly in this neck of the woods is about as common as bats out in the middle of the ocean. (More on that later.) We have been expecting a westerly or NWesterly all along.
So for now we are hanging onto a thin, easterly thread as we scamper towards Cape Flattery and the entrance to the Straits of Juan de Fuca at 7k and only 800 nm away! How long this breeze will last is anyone's guess, but we'll take it.
As for the birds, at night our stern light has attracted these small, black birds that move like bats with their random, jerky flight patterns. Jim called them bat birds, to which I figure we must be sailing on a bat boat in the middle of a bat ocean! But let's not go any further with that one, shall we?!! They are pretty vocal little guys and other than getting close to the stern light, they stay pretty much away from the boat. That is, except for the one that got a little too close to the jib in the middle of a luff. The jib bitch-slapped the poor little bugger right down onto the deck. I found him on the deck back by the cockpit in the middle of the night a few nights ago. He was shaking the cobwebs out of his head and wasn't looking too perky. But I guess he must've gotten it all together cuz he was gone again an hour later.
Other marine life has been pretty much non-existent. No whales yet, unfortunately. But this morning a huge pod of small dolphins swam with us for awhile. This pod covered a good three acres of water, there were so many of them. Some of them would jump out of the water during the surface breathing. It was a fun albeit brief source of enjoyment.
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07/01/2011, 37N; 153W
The traditional course from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest calls for a running of due north out of Hawaii till you get to a period of variable winds. Then motor or motorsail through/around the top of the high till you meet westerly trades and then carry the westerlies into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and into Seattle.
short term it would appear that we have turned the corner in the past 24 hours. As of Sat., July 2, we are sailing directly for Seattle (NE) in a NW breeze, and stronger westerlies are forecast. So Jim and I are feeling like the worst is over and we are almost home. Well, almost home. There is that little matter of 1,500 nm between us and 'home' that still needs to be dealt with!! But for now we are hopeful that it is, as they say, "all downhill from here, baby"!!
The weather is sunny during the day, and that lifts our spirits and gives us a chance to dry things out that need to be dried. Heck, yesterday it was so warm and sunny that Jim and I both got in showers (not together, OK?!!). But during the early evening the sky clouds over and we get pummeled with squalls. These squalls we are learning have less punch to them wind-wise, but still contain their fair share of rain. The next morning we start the whole process all over again. The one thing we are both having to adjust to is the temperature. It is c-c-c-c-cold up here!! At night I am wearing everything I own! Yuck!! I yearn for the 'good 'ole days' when a pair of shorts was all you needed to go sailing (and sometimes not even those!).
We haven't seen much in the way of wildlife. No dolphins or whales. We only just started fishing. There are a few birds around, but not too many. One small, black one hitched a ride with us last night. I think he got slapped silly by a luffing jib and fell to the deck and hung out on the leeward deck for an hour or so getting his bearings before taking off.
The one thing there is plenty of out here is trash. Most of what we see are plastic/rubber/fiberglass fishing balls that were once attached to large fishing nets and now drift free. These balls don't worry me, but wrapping a section of net in our prop is a constant danger and source of concern whenever we are motoring. We turned around yesterday and pulled one particularly spiffy-looking ball out of the water at Jim's request. It was clean on top and underneath was a whole ecosystem!! Mussels abounded. But what really intrigued me was the number of crabs amongst the mussels. Jim scraped them all off the buoy and back into the water to be some other fish's dinner. But to see the number of crabs and the size of the feet on the mussels was pretty cool.
And this afternoon we had a friendly visitor come a-callin'. I went out to the cockpit from the galley to peel some hard boiled eggs for a salad I was making to find fish on!! I hauled that baby in and we had ourselves a nice bluefin (ahi) tuna! You know, the kind they make sushi with and charge $25 or more for at those fancy restaurants? And this baby wasn't one of those measly 3 or 3 kilo mahi-mahi jobs. Oh no. We are talking around 15 kilo (30#) +/-. So Jim and I will be eating tuna for awhile....a long while. Ummm, would you like some tuna with your oatmeal?!!!
Jim and I continue to debate our return date. I insist on the 14th (at 1600, if you must know!). Right now, from 1,400 nm out, it looks to be sometime between the 13th and 15th. But a lot of water has to go under the hull between now and then, so who really knows? We will be restricted by Deception Pass. Since we can only go through there on a slack or flood tide, we will have to make our entrance into the pass sometime between 0930 and around 1200 if we want to have any chance of making it to Oak Harbor in daylight.
But that is all waaay far forward. For now we are settling into the business at hand....which is getting this boat and us safely and quickly into the protected waters of Puget Sound.
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07/01/2011, 36N; 155W
Remember that ole 60's ditty? It was Sonny and Cher, I think, who popularized it for me. Anyway, the beat goes on for us. We continue to beat into the wind, as expected. We have been out of Honolulu 6 days now, beating into a northeasterly. (Actually, because our boat doesn't "beat" into the wind that efficiently, we have cracked the sheets off a bit and have been close, close reaching northwards.)
The modern, conventional strategy for the Hawaii-to-Seattle run is to head north till you run out of the trades, then cut across the top of the high in a NWerly direction until you reach the easterlies, and then ride the easterly trades into the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Well, it would seem that we ran out of the NErly trades and into the high last night. At present we are motoring northwards under sunny, blue skies with the jib furled hoping to find those easterly trades sometime this weekend.
At that point it should be all downhill....theoretically. I suspect there may be a beam sea for the first day or three and that could be a bit uncomfortable if it materializes. Anything can change, and change quickly out here, but for the present it seems we have reached the second stage of our journey -- negotiating the high. Our spirits our lifted as we recognize and hope this transcendence to the second stage. It means we may not have to beat into the wind anymore, AND it (hopefully) means no more of those pesky squalls.
Puget Sound is still 1,600 nm away. But if we are lucky, I am hoping to go through Deception Pass sometime between 0800-1000 in the morning. The date? Dunno right now, but I will as we get closer. Right now I am picking Thurs., July 14. Jim has picked the 15th. But if we can hit the Pass on the morning flood like I hope, we can make Oak Harbor by the afternoon. And if anyone is in the area, you can come out onto the bridge and wave at us as we pass underneath!!!! I'll keep you posted as we get closer.
Both of us are anxious to get home to our families. I am anxious to get started with the next chapter of our lives. But all in good time. For now we have to attend to the boat and ourselves -- keeping our bodies rested and the boat together. On that latter count, I had hoped to escape having to climb the rig on this passage. It is a relatively short passage and for just once I wanted to cross an ocean without climbing. Not to be. Our LED masthead tricolor light went out last night so there I was this afternoon replacing it. Luckily, the sea is calm today so the rocking wasn't so bad.
That is all to report for now. We are looking forward to seeing everyone soon! God bless us!
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