March, 2012:

We are surrounded by dark clouds, many in the distance are steel grey right down to the water indicating a downpouring of rain. Above us, strangely, is a patch of blue sky, just for us. If it was night, you could see flashes of lightening illuminating the towering clouds that look like volcanoes erupting up into the sky. The sun, when the black clouds pass to let it through, is blindingly white. After a nice rain shower this morning the last puff of wind blew out and it’s been glassy calm all afternoon. Unless we get too close to the black clouds. Then the wind, and often rain, just seems to pour straight down out of them for a few minutes.

This place is eerie; we have no desire to linger and have run the engine for the first time in nearly two weeks in order to reach the other side, and the southeast trades, more quickly in these glassy conditions. Sometimes a squall will last long enough that we can take advantage of the wind to gain more peaceful miles under sail, as we are doing now.

We’re passing through the ITCZ, or the Intertropical Convergence Zone. This is the narrow band of light- or non-existent wind, rain squalls, and thunderheads that mark the change between the northeast trade winds and southeast winds that lie on the other side. Our daily weather fax shows it between 3 and 4 degrees north; we just passed under 4 degrees so hopefully 60 miles or so and we’ll be back in the trades.

Total miles at noon: 1535
Miles since yesterday: 93
Apples remaining: 8*

*There are Puddle Jump provisioning articles on the internet galore so I won’t add to the pile of them except to say that the fruit that has tasted the best and lasted the longest (the remaining ones taste as fresh as when I loaded them on the boat 2.5 weeks ago) are good old Washington apples! I wish I had packed on at least twice as many as I did, especially the green Granny Smiths (which are excellent with Nutella by the way) but who would think they’d be so happy in the equatorial heat?

It’s been a long hard week, what with all the confused seas and bouncy, windy conditions. But today we were given a reprieve with 15 knots of wind from the east, almost on our beam, and much more comfortable seas. It is just beautiful out here: the sun is directly above us during the day, the sea still a brilliant blue and every cloud shape you can imagine is scattered across the sky. We look at the chart and see how very far we are from the nearest land and for some reason it doesn’t spark a fit of internal panic any longer. We’ve grown comfortable out here with our rolling blue backyard. We love listening to our nightly radio nets; even though our fellow puddle jumpers are hundreds of miles away it feels like they are right next door for the time we listen to all the check-ins. There is actually another boat very near to us, Cheers is about 62 miles to the east. We’ve been able to talk on the VHF and it thrilled us both to be so close in this vast body of water.

We were all able to get nice long naps in which has made a world of difference in our energy today. The girls and I made “boiled cookies” (basically butter, sugar, oats, peanut butter and cocoa that you cook up then cool spoonfuls on waxed paper). There’s no way the oven is going on for a while!

It’s looking like Monday for crossing the equator and we are getting very, very excited.

Total miles at noon: 1442
Miles since yesterday: 119
Minutes it took me to comb out the snarls in Holly’s curly hair: 45
Minutes it took me to comb out Leah’s straight hair: 2
Number of squid found on deck this morning: 2

Yahooie! We are officially half way there!

My, but this is a big, huge, rolly ocean.

We are at 6 degrees north. It is hot and steamy and you just wouldn’t believe the smell that is growing by the day inside the boat; it oozes and swirls around in the air from our bodies, the dinette cushions, our beds, the garbage, the head, dirty dishes in the sink. We had a little wind squall last night that brought a sprinkle of rain and are definitely hoping to collect enough rain soon to give us all a badly needed freshwater rinse (we are saving the water in our tanks just for drinking and we don’t have a watermaker). The smells and heat — and nonstop rolling — gave all the adult crew another bout of sea-nausea these past few days but we seem to be better today. I managed to not only bake a loaf of sourdough bread this morning (Del Viento, your travelling starter is happy as can be back out here!). I also got an entire pot of last-of-the-zucchini soup going in the pressure cooker just a few minutes ago without having to run outside and put my face in the wind like a puppy dog every few minutes.

The girls are handling the trip amazingly well so far. As I suspected, Leah is thoroughly enjoying the extra time playing games, reading and just talking with her parents. She is very proud that she’s sailing across this ocean and loves to find our position on our various maps and globes. I can tell Holly is pretty much done with all this based on the increasing frequency of temper tantrums, but then maybe she’s just being 3 1/2. We did sit in the cockpit yesterday afternoon and reenacted the entire “Gato con Botas” movie which she was thrilled about and I probably wouldn’t have found time to do except for being out here. Holly tells me she’s looking forward to a playground, ice-cream, and sleeping in her own bed when we arrive at the islands. For what we are asking both girls to cope with, it’s pretty amazing to see how, mostly, happy they are out here.

The NE trades continue to blow steadily at 15-20 knots and we are rocking and rolling, night and day, south.

Total miles at noon: 1323
Miles since yesterday: 129
Number of times we’ve had to fix broken reef hardware on the boom: 2
Gallons of fresh water used to mist ourselves in the cockpit (well worth every drop!): 0.15

The wind came up last night just as we were tucking the girls into bed. It increased from 15 to 25 in what seemed like a matter of minutes. We reduced sail lickity split to just the staysail and were comfortably moving along at 5 knots with only that little sail up. We were hoping that it was just a wind squall and would pass but it wasn’t, the wind whistled in the rigging all night long. Sleep was hard to come by what with all the commotion and rocking back and forth as the waves slid under our port quarter. When it was time for my watch at 4 am the warm damp wind was still gusty but starting to moderate a bit. I curled up in a corner of the cockpit with my ipod and immediately closed my eyes and fell asleep. My eyes snapped open minutes later and I spent the next three hours desperately trying to keep them open, where I’d been trying desperately to sleep just a few hours before. By the time Michael was up at 0800 the wind had dropped enough for us to unfurl the genoa and hoist the reefed main back up. We’re now cruising steadily towards the ITCZ — squallville — and tonight we have just under 600 miles to go to the equator. Getting so close!

Total miles at noon: 1194
Miles since yesterday: 114
Flying fish, deceased, found in the furled mainsail: 1
Cabbages remaining: 5.5

We are definitely in the tropics now; it is hot, humid, sticky and smelly. Combined with the rowdy, confused seas all I want to do is lay in front of a fan and dream of ice-cream. The wind did clock around more to the east, just aft of our beam so we have been able to sail all day with our main and mizzen up as well as the genoa. This has made for a much more comfortable ride and Wondertime is happily ticking the miles off. We continue to celebrate the little milestones: today marked 1000 miles. In a couple more days we’ll officially be half way there and, assuming we don’t drift too long in the doldrums, we should be crossing the equator in less than a week. Then it’s only 800 miles or so more until landfall at Hiva Oa.

Of course, that’s still two weeks to go, many more days of sailing toward the edge of the horizon and waiting for that tiny bit of land to come into view. As I look ahead at the miles and miles to go, I realize I am sailing toward the edge of many things: my endurance, my patience, my anxiety, my fear, my joy. Just when I think I’ve reached all there is, I keep finding more. Anxieties come around (how many days are we from a hospital again?), fear of something going very wrong. But then I have no choice but to let it simmer for a while, accept it and watch it pass. Like the changing sea around us.

Total miles at noon: 1080
Miles since yesterday: 129
Flying fish found stranded in the galley: 1