Let us eat cake.

27 Feb 19:50 ship’s time – 680nm SW of Cabo San Lucas — As I write we have succumbed to the calm and are motoring again. We’re moving along at almost 6kn with a very light northeasterly breeze behind us. We’ve had a tough and very light wind couple of days here, sticking to sailing through all of it. Conditions were decent at times, and downright miserable at others. Last night, starting just around dinner time, the sea state decided to get really ugly. It felt like we were bobbing in a bathtub full of gigantic toddlers.

The commotion was so bad that despite the decent 12-15kn of breeze we had, the boat could hardly get moving through the friction of the disorganized waves. We stuck to our sails though, knowing that sailing was still possible, just slow and challenging. The motion in the cabin was so violent it was hard to even walk around, even with two hands on holds nearby. The seas finally abated by the early hours of the morning, and we kept sailing all day with a light northeasterly. It wasn’t until late afternoon today that we threw in the towel again and fired up the engine. Not a bad effort from the Flyer crew!

With the quiet, light sailing today we were able to get through a few lingering maintenance items and boat chores. I spent an hour re-shimming the companionway door latch. I guess over the past few years the soft steel catch has been worn down and it wouldn’t hold when the boat flexed, and the bomb-proof aluminum door would swing wildly open as the boat heeled and slam against the opposite open side. Nice to have that one done!

We also discovered today that with the significant increase in humidity out at sea, our freezing plates in our small refrigerator had iced-up much quicker than ever before. I discovered almost a full inch of ice coating the plates, which really reduces the efficiency of the refrigerator, something we care a lot about with our limited electrical energy aboard.

As I usually do, I collected the icy chunks into a bucket and gave them to the boys to play with. This time they thought it would be best put to use cooling the ocean, so they threw blocks of ice into the big blue around us yelling “we’re trying to slow global warming!”

We’re also using this engine time to make more water, and take advantage of the warm water we’re getting. Showers were had again, by most of us, and I took the opportunity to wash the salt off of our cabin house windows and port lights, as well as hose some more dried Mahi blood off of the cockpit floor with hot water. That stuff is pretty sticky, I have a feeling we’ll still be seeing remnants of that fish many months from now!

As of 3:15p today, it’s been a week for us on this journey. Hard to believe, honestly, since it doesn’t feel that long to us right now. Unfortunately though, as you can probably tell, this week has been much slower than we’d hoped. We’ve covered 893 nautical miles in that time, which averages out to 127nm per day. Okay I suppose for a heavily laden 44’ boat, but a bit of a bummer to know we’ve also run the engine for 31.5 hours.

Speaking of the engine, I think we have enough fuel aboard to power at a modest RPM for 160 hours. Conservatively, we really should only use 2/3rds of that. Converting that to miles, we’ve been budgeting around 600nm, or just over 100 hours of motoring at around 5.25kn. 600nm is 1/5th of the journey, which very well could have a lot more dead calm for us to deal with, and we’re really hoping to save our fuel for when we’ll need it the most!

Even though it’s been a slow passage so far, we’re still really lucky we left when we did. The large ridge of high pressure that’s been chasing us since we rounded Baja 6 days ago looks like it’s settling in for quite a while, so any further delay in our departure would have probably meant waiting in Mexico for a better weather window… probably more that 2 weeks later!

We just finished our taco dinner tonight (man we miss the real deal back in Mexico!), and the boys and Kristen are fixing to watch some more episodes of the Office while I stand watch on my early evening shift. Kristen just revealed a surprise cake, that she’s calling the “One-Week Cake,” in honor of this most momentous occasion. There’s a beautiful waxing gibbous moon out and it’s already pretty bright. I’m looking forward to another nice evening out here on the Pacific, even if we are motoring.