24 Feb 16:05 GMT -8 It’s so great to be sailing again. The last 24 hours have been pretty light, and the engine has been running almost continuously. We were in a calm for quite a while last night, and we motored through it all into dawn, which was glassy little bit of low, light fog, which looked beautiful on the water.
We continued motoring through the day today until around 2 PM when we were seeing puffs up to 6 knots. We promptly shut down the engine and set the A3. Since then the breeze has been building, to our surprise it’s now up to around peaks of 11 or 12 kn. We’re sailing along nicely at 6 to 7 kn. What a delight!
Kristen and I were talking earlier about how it’s such a fine line between misery (motoring through the calm) and ecstasy (beam reaching on a gorgeous day in 12 kn of breeze) on a day like today. Sailing is such a funny thing sometimes.
Our Watt&Sea Hydrogenerator is running nicely right now and giving us more than enough power to also make water. A couple hours ago I cleaned the seawater strainer and replaced the five µm filter, but unfortunately, the solids levels are still around the same, high 200’s ppm. Still good enough to drink, but a little annoying to see it creep higher. Maybe I should’ve run that cleaning cycle back in La Paz? Maybe we should just be running it every day? Maybe more use will make it better.
Paul has three fishing lures out right now hoping for another tuna, this one maybe to keep for poke tonight. He pulled out a loose tooth today and after a quick celebration, decided to throw it into the sea for king Neptune.
At separate times today, James and Paul were each stunned when coming on deck at the beauty of the blue ocean all around us. The color of the ocean this far offshore is probably the most beautiful color I can imagine. All oceans have a slightly different tint to them, some grey, some green, some black… but the deep blue Pacific here sure does remind me a lot of the Gulf Stream.
I’ve had a couple songs stuck in my head for the last few days both of them by Stephen Malkmus. Church on White and the subsequent song on his first record The Hook for some reason both feel very poignant right now on this passage.
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