All over the map

The last couple of days have gone by in a blur. Not that time has transpired quickly, just less coherently. 

We’ll start with the sailing conditions which, if you’ve been following the tracker, have clearly kept us on our toes, day and night. Contrary to previous forecasts, the conditions have continued to be fickle at best. For the last 36 hours we have been teased with senses of a freshening breeze, only to see the wind speed drop precipitously minutes later. The wind direction is following course, as it usually does, and is swinging wildly through 70 degrees at times. The seas have continued to be confused, mixing seasonal NW swells with wind driven waves from every other direction. 

It’s been really hard to keep Flyer going all this time. Just when we begin to get momentum and feel that we have sails trimmed to meet the conditions, things change almost immediately. We’ve put up virtually every sail in our wardrobe, only to conclude that the sail combination is wrong. It feels a lot like ocean racing, excepting we’re not in a race, right? 

But in reality we have found ourselves in a race with the weather. The ridge of high pressure that initially gave us challenges after Cabo San Lucas over a week ago with light and shifty conditions has continued to expand and follow us westward. We’ve felt like we’re being chased by a gentle demon who enjoys watching us bob around in the windless blue. And we’ve managed to stay just ahead of the bad stuff, which is in some ways good (we have had some wind) and bad (we have had some calms). All the weather models have been showing that there are more consistent, 10-15kn breezes just a handful of miles ahead of us… and we’ve been struggling to catch up!

To make matters even more challenging, our mid-passage waypoint -established as the point at which we think we will enter consistent NE trade winds just north of the equator- has continued to be almost directly downwind of our location. Flyer does not like dead-downwind sailing if the wind speed is below around 15kn, so we sail ‘hotter’ angles to the wind, meaning we don’t point directly at the destination but closer to the wind, giving the boat a little more speed through the water and requiring us to gybe occasionally so we don’t stray too far from our desired part of the ocean.

These conditions mean that we are constantly reassessing both our sail combination/trim and whether or not we should be motoring. The latest outlook for the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ, or doldrums) shows a bit more activity, and therefore potential for sustained calm, than we had originally anticipated. As a result we are saving our motoring for only our most desperate moments, like this morning around 0530 when we found ourselves becalmed after hours of very light-air drifting. 3 hours later we shut the engine down and found ourselves sailing again at a meager 3 knots, 30 degrees off of course. We’ll take what we can get!

Life on board suffers at times like these, or at least my perception of it does. I’ve not slept much recently, so Kristen and I have been flexing our watch times during the day in hopes of me being able to get a little more shut-eye during daylight hours. 

The boys seem in a good mood nonetheless! Paul has been frantically thinking about the sailing dinghy of his dreams (a 29er) and as with all of his obsessions, he finds himself drawing that thing. James has been reading and, when the internet is on, connecting with his cousin Sam and school friends to play games together. 

James also somehow just realized that his hair was too long -probably after discovering a rather large dreadlock-in-the-making- and promptly negotiated the grand opening of Kristen’s Aft Deck Salon.

Anticipating an excruciatingly hot cabin in the coming week(s), Kristen has made the most of our oven and has roasted beets and baked focaccia recently. We’ll be having beet sandwiches for dinner tonight!

To distract myself from the continued second-guessing, I decided to break out my guitar today. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever played it in the open ocean, and it gave me great pleasure. I was revisiting some of my favorite songs by Andy Shauf and the Beths. Maybe I’ll do some Led Zep tomorrow.

The breeze seems to be slowly picking up now, so I need to get back to the sail trim. Thank you all for reading, it makes us so happy to know we can maintain a little connection with you all this far away from home.