Sailing Wondertime

There are five brand-new shellbacks aboard Wondertime today! At 3pm local time we crossed over the equator and are now in the South Pacific Ocean.

The girls and I worked on making turtle hats for everyone to wear today for the crossing. I can’t wait to show you the pictures. The adults celebrated with our Special Equator Beers (tasty brews from the UK we’d found in a specialty beer shop in La Paz and have been saving for this day). We also inhaled half a Costco-sized bag of Kettle chips. The girls enjoyed pineapple popsicles from our tiny frosty freezer, some special candy treats and another viewing of Finding Nemo afterwards.

It was just exhilarating, watching those numbers count down to 0, then switch from north latitude to south latitude. All five of us sat in the cockpit with our eyes on the GPS numbers counting down. It was like the most exciting New Year’s Eve ever, except the sun was directly overhead, blinding white and the sea a color of turquoise I’ve never seen before all around us.

We are on the last leg now, although still waiting for wind that will carry us faster than 2 knots. But we’re moving, so we’ll wait. The last three nights we motored through seas so glassy the stars were reflecting on the water. We didn’t have any more wind today so kept on motoring until we were a few miles north of the line, then put up the main, mizzen & genoa. Amazingly the wind came up a bit at the same time and we drifted across the equator at a blazing 2.5 knots. No matter, it gave us plenty of time to savor the moment and our new status as shellbacks.

Total miles at noon: 1808
Miles since yesterday: 98
Current latitude: 0 3′ S
Finding Nemo viewings aboard, including today’s: 174 give or take

99 miles
from the equator, becalmed
spinnaker hangs limp

Total miles at noon: 1710
Miles since yesterday: 85
Miles sailed since we turned off the motor eight hours ago: 15
Miles to Hiva Oa: 958

According to the skies and our weather charts, we’re officially south of the ITCZ. But apparently the weather is playing an April Fools’ joke on us: over the next few days it is supposed to be moving south, to around 6 degrees S. What that means is if it doesn’t move again by the time we get down there then we’ll have to go through that dreadful zone TWICE. Good grief.

Still, that’s a long way from where we are, especially at our current pace (and the ITCZ is a very shifty thing and could likely move north again by the time we get that far south). We motored for a few hours yesterday afternoon, then were able to sail again until around the time for our radio check-ins. As night fell the wind did also and we found ourselves bobbing around in a windless sea. We just sat there for a while, enjoying the peace and the stillness. The sea around us was lit up by the glowing half moon at the top of the sky and the western horizon still had the slight orangey glow of sunset. It was lovely, and tempting to just put on the anchor light and call it a night. We haven’t seen another ship since our first nights off of Mexico.

We didn’t though as our desire to bring this trip to a close sometime in the next two weeks is just too overwhelming, if you can imagine. The engine was fired up and we motored through the glassy, still night.

At sunrise, happily, a light NE wind came up, only about five knots, but with our spinnaker and mizzen up we’ve been able to keep sailing at about 2.5 knots all day. The next few days are scheduled to bring more light winds, then pick up on Wednesday to a rip-roaring 10 knots. In the meantime though, it’s not so bad strolling through the doldrums. We’ve got our fans humming, buckets of clean and pure turquoise salt water to throw over ourselves, our cockpit shade cooling our outdoor room and the most amazing view on the planet.

Total miles at noon: 1625
Miles since yesterday: 90
Temperature inside the boat: 90F
Dorado fish caught and devoured!: 1

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