And the socks are back on…

For the first time since December, the crew on Flyer are wearing socks again! The air temperature has been dropping precipitously since we passed through a front almost 36 hours ago. The wind picked up from the northeast and with it came a welcome blast of cool air. 

We’re currently moving along better than expected under sail, heading north west with 8-12kts of breeze at between 4.5-5.5kts of boat speed. The skies have cleared this morning and a lovely cool breeze is washing over us. For the first time since California, back in October, we have most hatches closed because it’s too chilly to do otherwise! A few of us are donning long underwear and long sleeve shirts, and we’re all cuddling up under comforters and blankets in our bunks when we’re sleeping. Pelle has even been snoozing in her cabin (a tiny locker near Kristen’s side of the bunk) and emerges with a spring in her step when she arouses for some attention, or more likely food. 

It’s been a few days since our last check in, and despite the rather quiet and sleepy atmosphere on board Flyer, there have been a few highlights:

We’re enjoying our new reefing system! 

Back in Honolulu I discovered our second reef line was severely chafed at the boom where it wrapped on itself to dead end the clew line. Our neighbor Yves on Zorba had experienced the same thing on that humdinger of a leg from Rangiroa, so he and I made a bulk express order of new, lighter but stronger lines from Fisheries Supply and within a couple of days I had it all rigged up. We now have much smaller, stronger, lower stretch lines in the simplified system which is a breeze to use compared to our old setup, which featured some clumsy, stiff nylon ‘ropes’ (I’ll use this derogatory term because they were that bad) finagled into some ‘design of convenience’ by the genius boom makers at Selden. It was a single line reefing system, which means that by pulling one line, one might be able to bring both the tack and the clew of the mainsail down simultaneously. Great in theory, but horrendous in practice, since it requires multiple parts of the line, turning around various blocks and sliding mechanisms within the boom to make it work. All this complexity creates friction which is your enemy when trying to wrestle a sail under control, or even when trying to shake it out. Now our new system feels virtually frictionless and we even get to pull the tack down with our bare hands too. A joy to operate and some pretty new colors to boot.

We caught a sweet skipjack tuna! 

Skipjack tuna are known for their dark red meat and were the original species that the Poke bowl originated with in Hawaii. Most skipjack tunas are around 6-8lbs, but we got a good one at around 15-20lbs. It must have been old since the fight was a pretty easy one (ha!). Paul had assembled a custom lure, which featured “a clear head with googly eyes, a clear and black dotted underskirt with a purple and blue underskirt, and a big 8-0 J hook, or something like that, dad.” Whatever it was, it did the trick!

After a fast initial run, the fish was quickly reeled into submission and brought to the boat without much fuss. Its death throes were something else though. After our humane brain spike, it went into a violent spasm and almost shot half its blood down the portlight above James’s bunk after it jumped into the cockpit! Luckily it was short lived and we processed the fish quickly for a poke bowl lunch. Fish tacos and teriyaki tuna bowls were to follow with the remaining the following days. Yum yum.

We went for a swim! 

As fate would have it, the wind and daylight finally aligned and gave us an almost windless spell on Wednesday. We had been motoring along for over 12 hours and decided it was time for a break. We shut the engine down, removed the windpilot from the swim platform, and dropped a line and throwable cushion overboard, and went to work. Given our two crossings of the equator and countless miles through the intertropical convergence zones, it’s surprising that our best chance to swim was at 31 degrees north! It was great to cool off (the water was about 71degF) and mind blowing to think there was over 3 miles of water beneath us. The timing couldn’t have been better as within 24 hours we had 30kts of wind, the sea surface temperature was 68degF, and the air temp was down to the mid-60s with no sun.

We’ve seen a lot of trash!

Sadly, this part of the Pacific seems loaded with floating plastics. We’re not far from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which lies a few hundred miles to our east, and as a result we’re likely seeing offshoots or soon-to-be-members of this unfortunate human stain on the ocean. From the research we’ve done, almost all of the contents of the Garbage Patch are plastics related to the fishing industry, as well as some additional domestic refuse from Asia. It’s sad to see and a good reminder for us of just how bad the international fishing industry can be for the world. For a deep dive into this, I’d highly recommend listening to The Outlaw Ocean podcast. Give this episode a go.

We have plenty of time to sleep! 

It’s so great to have Cameron here for many many reasons, but perhaps most fundamentally he makes our watch system very manageable. His additional help gives us all plenty of time to sleep or relax when the weather is agreeable- which it has been this whole leg more or less. We have defaulted to a 4 on, 8 off schedule so far, which is absolutely luxurious for me and Kristen compared to our standard offshore routine of 4 on 4 off. There’s surely some boisterous (and colder) weather ahead so it will also pay dividends to have more hands on deck when we need to adjust sail and maneuver.

We’re looking at a lot of weather maps!

This is the most challenging of our legs to forecast, so we wait with bated breath for every new weather model run (which happen every 6 hours or so). The challenges are concentrated in the northern half of this passage, which we are essentially in now, which I’d define as the zone between the NE tradewinds (that ended for us around 33 degrees north) and our destination in the Aleutians. This is the zone that the dreaded low pressure systems migrate through during most of the year, and the North Pacific High dominates in the summer. The high hasn’t become clearly defined quite yet and we’re getting remnants of weak low pressure systems moving across our track, giving us variable conditions defined by a series of fronts and pressure ridges. Our game right now is to figure out how to sail between the bands of wind, through the light wind areas as much as possible. We’ve already motored through one, and are looking at another one or two dead spots in the coming week or so. For now, the models seem to agree that by Monday we’ll be in some stronger southerly winds and making better headway due north towards Dutch Harbor. 

There’s a new run of weather models now! Gotta get on it… more soon!