PPJ Day 15
17 April 2016 | The Pacific Ocean
Vandy
The big news from SCOOTS today is WE CROSSED THE EQUATOR!!! Woohoo!
At 2:22 am SCOOTS Adjusted Time - or 1022 UTC - we crossed the Equator just west of Longitude 132 W. We were traveling at 6.5 knots, in about 11 knots of steady SE tradewinds.
Aside from noticing that a few degrees north of the Equator, we sailed through a region that had swells coming in from both the NE and the SE, which was kind of a cool convergence thing, there were no other indications, other than our GPS telling us that we had crossed. No flat calm doldrums, no dragons, no krakens, no one trying to sell us cheap souvenirs. And no obvious line on the water to mark the place, either. Hmph, but it was always there on all the globes I ever had. Although it was dark outside at the time; maybe they don't keep it lit at night.
It is traditional to have a goofy ceremony at the equator, even the Navy does it so I asked Eric to wake me up for the occasion, as it occurred in the middle of his watch, and I awoke to my hand being tickled by something soft. When I opened my eyes, Eric was sitting by the bed wearing his blue Mickey Mouse wizard hat, his SCOOTS t-shirt, and his harness, and was tickling my hand with a handmade "wand" that he'd fashioned by slightly unraveling the end of a short bit of stiff retired spinnaker line. Haha that was a sight to wake up to!
When we crossed the Equator, we tipped 2 shots of our good sipping rum over the side: one to Neptune, and one to Aeolus, to thank both of them for their consideration thus far, and to entreat their continued support on our journey. Then we each had a small shot of rum, bumped fists, talked for a little while about how it was that we came to be HERE and then I went back to bed for another hour.
I thought it might be fun to start flushing our hand-pump toilet as we approached the Equator, and report whether it instantaneously started swirling in the opposite direction when we crossed into the Southern Hemisphere, but I didn't do it. Maybe the sudden change of vortex direction would have created a maelstrom that would have engulfed SCOOTS and sucked us down to the dark blue depths. LOL the world will never know!
Later in the morning, we put a SCOOTS boat card in a plastic bag, and put that into a blue bottle that we'd been saving. On the back of the boat card, we wrote a short greeting and asked the person who found the bottle to let us know where they'd found it. We included the date and the lat/lon where we'd dropped the bottle. The cork went in, the photo was taken, and the bottle went over the side, beginning its journey to...who knows where?
The day and night leading up to the crossing were some great sailing! The skies have definitely cleared and we had no squalls at all in our neighborhood. We can now see the Marquesas in the same screen of our navigation program as our little moving boat icon, without having to zoom very far out. It was a great day.
Deck Check: no casualties, or maybe they were washed back into the ocean by the waves continually splashing over Miles in last 24 hours: 175, for an average speed of 7.3 knots (see, I told you it was a good sailing day!) Total miles traveled: 2225 Miles to go: 655