Sockdolager Blog

If you are interested in other boats out here with us, you should check out the blog of our friends Karen and Jim on Sockdolager - http://karenandjimsexcellentadventure.blogspot.com. They are the smallest of the 'Puddle Jumpers' on a Dana 24 and are excellent bloggers. Karen is also a talented musician and song writer and, like me, Jim was a software developer in his real life.

Oddly enough, due to radio propagation, it is easier for us to download their blog via radio email (saildocs) than to talk to them to find out how things are going.

Cannibalism on Nuka Hiva

Great - as if light winds and running low on provisions is not enough to worry about, our friend Kurt off S/V Raven just sent us this information:

"I checked out Renova's blog today and they are out on the Marshals looking at WWII scrap metal. They mention a cruiser's rumor about a cannibal killing recently in Nuka Hiva, which has now been confirmed. A German sailor, age 40 has been positively identified from teeth remains in the fire pit - I kid you not. A local hunting guide is being sought in a big manhunt. Not a pretty picture. It will be all the news by the time you get there, but if he hasn't been caught I'd be very cautious about the whole thing as he will have nothing to lose."

I guess they must have been running low on Spam at the local store...

Birthday Musings - Day 4

I awoke late today. Rani ad let me sleep in until 5 am and I had 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep - bliss! It is my 47th birthday and this is one of the best presents you can get on a passage. The second present I received 45 minutes later when a light northwest wind began to fill in and I was able to turn Ladybug south toward Clarion Island, after a night of very light westerly progress. My third gift was a stunning sunrise, golden and framed by a line of ragged dark clouds under which we had sailed in the night. This is my 4th or 5th birthday celebrated on board, but the first while underway.

Our 4th day on passage was another quiet one - wind wise. We ran for much of the day like a cormorant with its wings spread to dry, broad reaching with the jib poled out opposite the main. In the afternoon the wind shifted and we took the pole down but continued to broad reach with the wind on our aft starboard quarter. Ladybug rolled around, even with the poled out jib to steady her, but life below was quite fine (as Hemingway might have said).

I finished "A Farewell to Arms" by Hemingway. I really enjoyed the book with its sparse narrative and unique style. We are now both listening to an audio book - a 'biography' of cancer titled the "Emperor of All Maladies" - powerful and well written/spoken. Audio books are a great way to wile away the night watches without keeping the off-watch crew awake with a light.

We also watched the final episode of season 1 of "The Six Million Dollar Man" on Rani's little 10" netbook. This is the first TV series I have re-watched from my childhood and I can easily recall how enthralled and uncritical I was as a child. The series now appears dated, the plots clumsy and contrived, but Steve Austin has plenty of charisma and there are pretty girls and evil men aplenty in most episodes. I suspect the writers borrowed this formula from James Bond and similar action/thriller movies. It is also interesting to note that several episodes touch on issues of feminism and women entering a male dominated world, with female astronauts and cowgirls.

Math and sailing - It was brought home to me yesterday how useful basic math is while out on passage. Apart from one obvious use in calculating your position using a sextant, basic math is needed to answer these questions - How far away can you see an approaching container ship whose lights are 70 feet above the sea? - Why is it that the wind indicator does not point into the 'true' wind and how can you determine from the wind indicator and your boat speed and course what the true wind is? Unfortunately my trigonometry and vector arithmetic skills are very rusty and Rani's are no better. The fact that I had trouble answering these questions also points out how much we have come to rely on the Internet as a reference. I would normally Google to look up a formula or locate a tutorial.

Nature-wise, we have seen a couple of brown boobies, one of whom tried to land on our mast yesterday. We also frequently see storm petrels flitting like swallows amongst the seas. These tireless little birds were also common on my passages to Hawaii and Canada on Ladybug I. The only sea life in the last day were dolphins, which swam alongside in the night, streaming trails of green phosphorescence. In the dark it is much easier to see how they move, with a steady pulsing left/right flicking of their tails at about 4 flicks a second. Quite lovely to watch.

Our position today (March 24) at 1430 Zulu was 19 36 N 113 26 W. We are running SW at about 4.5 knots in 5 knots of NW breeze. We hope to reach Isla Clarion tomorrow morning.

Day 3 - Becalmed - a Blessing in Disguise?

As frustrating as it can be, having no wind on a sailboat can be a good thing.

Yesterday - our third day out - saw very light airs for us and the other boats nearby that are also crossing to the Marquesas. We motored for two hours in the morning to steady the boat and look for wind, but gave up around mid-morning, figuring the swell was down enough that we could take down our sails and lie a-hull ('park the boat' - as our friends on Buena Vista put it). We swam in the indigo waters under cloudless skies, watching Ladybug roll alarmingly, even in the gentle northerly swell. It had been a week since our last proper shower in La Paz and rinsing off the grime of multiple night watches felt fantastic. Rani also took the vegetables out of their locker to allow them to air out - a daily chore now. I adjusted the propeller shaft stuffing box, which was leaking a little, and tightened some hose clamps on the muffler.

Despite the rolling boat, we decided to tackle a problem with Ladybug's structure. For the past two seasons, there has been a lot of noise - squeaks and the sound of wood flexing and rubbing against wood from the starboard center bulkhead area. The bulkhead here is what backs up the galley and the nav station, running across the boat. I finally traced the issue with a flashlight on the night watch because the sound was driving me nuts. After removing trim and panels from around the bulkhead, I found a fillet of epoxy that had cracked and no longer bonded the plywood bulkhead to the cabin sides. After chipping out the old epoxy, Rani helped me mix up some thickened epoxy and we injected this and worked it into the gap. It seems to have cured the noise from that area.

We sighted no shipping last night, but sailed through some heavy cloud and drizzle for much of the night, with a light north east wind on our beam. We actually sailed south east, 90 degrees off our desire course, in order to keep the sails filled and the boat moving. The radar alarm went off whenever a particularly thick shower came near us. The showers were too light to clean off our salty decks.

Our position this morning at 1430 Zulu (about 07:30 local time) was 19 56 N 112 02 W. We ran only 84 nautical miles in the last 24 hours, but the wind has picked up and we hope to reach or break 100 in the next 24 hours. At our current rate we will likely reach Clarion island sometime early Sunday morning.

Close Encounters of the Cargo Ship Kind

Here we are on our third morning at sea, having survived our second exciting night on the ocean blue. It is no coincidence in my mind that Chris and I had just read the chapter on "Preventing Collisions" in Earl Hinz's "Landafalls of Paradise" when we spied a large cargo ship about 8 miles to port. Hinz cites that we may think we are roaming unfettered on these vast oceans but there are hazards out here too and it is not surprising that boats are reported missing each year. We have to be aware of and cautious when crossing the shipping lanes of major trade routes. It so happened that we were in the direct path of ships coming from the Panama Canal to the Orient or heading north to the USA.

The sun had not yet set so I was pleased that we saw our nemesis or MV Antipolis in the daylight. We quickly switched on the radar and watched it's track. The fickle wind from the southwest was merely 3-4 knots and Ladybug was making little progress at 3.5K average while the mammoth motor vessel was cutting through the water at 20 Knots plus. Not having had a working radar over the last 3 years in Mexico, it is still a new gadget to us and we took out the manual to verify bearings and distances. We altered course to port, so it could pass in front of us at a safe distance.

The ship's angle did not seem to be changing and it was closing in on us fairly rapidly and I was growing anxious. Despite Hinz's note that not many ships monitor their radar or keep reliable watch when far from land, I was hopeful that they had seen us too. To allay my fear, despite Chris's advice, I called "oil tanker, oil tanker at position x, this is the sailing vessel Ladybug at position y " on VHF 16. After a second call and a long delay, I heard a heavily accented voice returning my hail. I asked if they had seen us on radar and he confirmed that they had picked us up at 10 miles and altered their course to port. I thanked them and found out they were heading for Los Angeles. He asked me about our destination and chuckled when I said "The Marquesas, eventually" and we ended on "Bon Voyage". As we looked at Antipolis back-lit by the setting sun, they blew their horn in adieu.

Phew!, I thought, we must have seen our fair share of shipping for this night. Not so. On my watch at 0250 local time, I saw a triangle of lights off our port beam. Through binoculars, I could see a red port light and maybe a green starboard light which meant he was coming straight for us. Our speed was only 3.5K and he seemed very close. On radar he was at 9 miles and a huge target. I did not hesitate in waking up Chris as the last ship only took about 20 minutes to get within a mile of us. We watched and tried to convince ourselves that the angle was changing but his relative bearing on the radar remained the same. I tried hailing on VHF 16 but there was no response. We had no idea if he had seen us on his radar. Should we alter our course or had he already made his move? When he was 2 miles away, we decided to take action. We rolled in the jib and turned on the motor to steer due south. After 10 minutes when we were 3 miles apart, we put up the sails again and watched his track as we headed on the same course but well ahead, no doubt to Japan or China.

So, all that made me wonder how many close calls did Chris have when he fell asleep every night on his solo passage to Hawaii and then Canada. I am glad I did not know of this at the time, otherwise I would have been a nervous wreck!

Our 24 hour position at 1400 Zulu (0730 local )today was North 21 deg 11 mins, West 111 deg 44 mins with 98 miles made good in the last 24 hours. During our second day at sea, the wind was light and variable from northwest to west. We had decent night sailing as it changed to 6-7 Knots from the west. This morning it's frustratingly light again. We tried to fly the spinnaker but the slow 6 foot nw swell prevented it from setting properly, so we are running the iron jenny (engine) for a few hours.

The Pacific Ocean seems justly named.

Day 1 - Slow and Bouncy

Well - we have survived our first 24 hours at sea. Both of us are on board and still on speaking terms!

We left Los Frailes (pos 23 40 N 109 30 W) at 7:30 yesterday (March 20) with a very nice following breeze of 12-18 knots. We polled out the jib and for a few hours ran south in the company of Xe (pronounced Jay but with a soft 'J' almost like Che Guevera). This large aluminum French yacht has twin head sails set on roller furlers and twin poles to hold them out. She started after us but after a couple of hours was abeam moving at about 7 knts to our 5.5 to 6. The wind then died down and the seas began to lump up, running from opposite directions as we neared Cabo San Lucas and the open Pacific. Xe took down her sails and motored off into the hazy distance while we tightened in our sails and continued for a couple of hours at about 3 kts. We saw a full grown humpback whale spy hopping repeatedly and others swimming in the distance. Eventually the wind died down almost completely and we took down the sails and motored into a very rough and confused sea. The motor is running much more smoothly, so it looks like our re-alignment, while not perfect, has fixed the major vibration issue. Our 'new' autopilot, which we assembled from parts of an old broken ST 1000 and another unreliable ST 2000 donated by a friend, was able to handle the confused seas with no issues. It is really nice to have self steering now when the wind dies out (for the last 3 years we have had only wind vane self-steering).

Around supper time, the winds came up from the south west and were able to hoist full sail and beat south again. Position reports on the Pacific Puddle Jump radio net from boats further ahead of us mentioned higher westerly winds, and sure enough as the night wore on the wind began to clock around into the west and then the north west, where it remains now. The seas were very lumpy all night with the boat rolling every few seconds through 20 degrees or so.

We kept 3+ hour watches last night with Rani doing 10-1:20, I did 1:20 to 4:45 and Rani 4:45 to 6:45. Rani is now trying to catch up on lost sleep.

At 7:30 am (24 hours out) our position was 22 03 N 110 25 W (degrees and minutes - 60 minutes in a degree). You can read our previous blog entry for a way to plot our progress on paper if you are interested. We made ran 106 nautical miles in this period with an average speed of about 4.4 knots. We had 5 hours of decent winds over 10 knots, 5 of near calm, 8 of light (5 knots or less) winds, and 6 of slightly less light 6-8 knot winds. Swells have been between 4 and 6 feet.

Following our progress

In all our passage reports we will give lat/long in degrees and minutes. If you would like to follow our progress, you can do what we have done and mark of a sheet of regular blank paper as follows:

Using a ruler or one side of an envelope, draw a grid of lines at 2 cm intervals and starting from the first line left of the top right corner, moving left, label the vertical lines 95, 100, 105, and so on - these are meridians of longitude (West). Each line represented 5 degrees of 'westing'.

Starting at the first line below the top right corner and moving down, label the horizontal lines 25, 20, 15, 10, 5, 0, 5S, 10S, 15S, 20S where S means south of the equator. Now Put an X at a position just below and to the right of the intersection of 25 deg North and 110 deg west. This is our starting position. For reference, Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of the Baja peninsula can be marked about a third of the way down from 25 deg N and just to the left of 110 deg W. Next you can put a mark at our first possible destination - Clarion Island - just to the right of 115 W and just below 20 N. This is an interesting place where we hope to sea sharks, whales, and giant mantas. Finally you can mark our ultimate passage destination at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas at 10 deg South and 138 deg West near the bottom left corner of your paper.

I know that being a computer geek I should have set up some sort of online chart to show our progress, but this is more interactive and a good boy scout or girl guide project - Get your badge in ocean navigation.

We're Off!

Rani tells me we should call this post "Night of Nerves". She had a restless night worrying about the trip - invisible coral reefs, long watches, food running out, sea-sickness, etc. On the positive side, she tells me that despite reading Typee, she did not worry about being eaten once we arrive :)

Yesterday we managed to take down the broken wind indicator, epoxy it back together and put it back up at the mast head despite a rolling anchorage. We were also successful (we think) in re-aligning the engine, which runs much more smoothly now. We rigged new preventer blocks for the main and a fore guy block and line to hold the whisker pole steady as we run downwind.

The wind was up all night but has settled down now around dawn. We are drinking mugs of steaming sweet chai and will leave in a few minutes, taking our departure from sunny Los Frailes at 23 deg 23 mins North, 109 deg 25 mins West.

Spirits of Cerralvo Island

Unlike my better half, I am not normally a superstitious person, but...

We had spent a restful day yesterday in our little anchorage just north of the southeast tip of Cerralvo Island. I scrubbed the propeller and shaft, scraping off barnacles and other growth, hoping this would 'cure' the roughness and vibration we were experiencing at certain RPMs. Rani preserved ginger in alcohol and made a hot lime pickle for the voyage.

We went ashore in the early afternoon and walked the mile of sand beach in both directions. At the south end of the beach we climbed up onto the rocks - uplifted seabed full of fossil shells and corals. There are two light towers at the point - one abandoned to an osprey nest and the other functional. There is also a memorial with a cross and a heart made of stones. Near the osprey's nest we found some worked stone fragments including what could possibly be a quartz arrow head. Magpie Rani added the quartz to her pocketful of shells.

We returned to the boat and after supper an osprey tried to land on the wind indicator at the top of our mast. I stepped into the cockpit just as something fell rapidly in front of me causing me to jump back and curse. Rani thought I had knocked over her racks of drying ginger, but what had happened was that the osprey had broken off the wind indicator vane, which fell into the cockpit, its arrow head breaking off. Later I was able to repair the vane, but restoring it to the top of the mast and replacing the starboard 45 degree indicator, which was also lost, will have to wait for a calm anchorage.

This morning, the wind came up to an unforecasted 25 knots and we awoke around 6 am to a big chop rolling into the anchorage. We started up the engine, but the noise I had thought would go away with cleaning was still there - possibly indicating engine misalignment. As we beat out of the anchorage, the dinghy slipped in its lashings, gouging the hand rails. I lashed it back down. It seems that our luck has left us. Perhaps we offended the spirit of the person who made the quartz arrow head?

And the arrow head? - it rests in the shallow waters off the point where Rani threw it, with a plea to any offended spirits, as we departed.

A rest stop at Cerralvo Island

We finally left La Paz yesterday around 4:30 pm after filling the tanks and spare cans with diesel and water. We dropped the hook in Lobos in the dark after a somewhat tricky entry, dodging fish farm pens near the mouth of the bay. Our final evening amongst society was spent with John from 'Time Piece' and Tom and Jeannie from 'Eagle' playing the dice game, 'Farkle' and chatting. We both won a round of Farkle - a good omen perhaps?

We departed around 8 am this morning under sail with light winds. Tom sounded a horn from Eagle, waking up the bay, and we were off. We made it through the San Lorenzo channel until the wind died completely and a sickening NE swell made motoring the best option. Later, a south east wind came up and we managed to sail for an hour or so in the Cerralvo channel. After much discussion, we opted to anchor off a small sand spit at the south west corner of the island. Tonight we hope to get a good night's sleep and tomorrow will do various tasks that are harder to do underway, such as cleaning the bottom, the propeller, and shaft, and making rotis and curries for the passage.