We made it to Hiva Oa, the Marquises, French Polynesia late May the 6th!! You've been asking about the crossing and we've been waiting to get internet and enough sun to have electricity for the computer! Here are some of the highlights (and some not so high as well).
Highs – Whales, dolphins, flying fish through the center
hatch into the salon (only funny because Darren’s foulie jacket saved me from
being pelted in the face by the fish!), rainbows, rain to drink and shower
with, sun coronas, our dorado buddies (even though they refused every hook we
offered them, they were good company), rainbow squid, the huge manta ray that
drafted us for hours (though rather startling when he rammed us – there arose
such a clatter, you’d think Santa and all the reindeer had rear ended us!), Sea
Angel going out of their way to buzz by us – the first humans we had seen
besides each other in 38 days! Thank you, what a treat!
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| A true Sea Angel! |
Lows – Lack of wind, a morale killer and energy sapper when
combined with excessive cross seas and short period chop!
Things we didn’t expect
- Washing machine seas with violent bone jarring wave slaps that made
the boat sound like it was falling apart.
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| Argh! |
So much cloud cover – wished we had
another way to make power besides solar (especially with one of our flexible
panels dying). So much rain in the doldrums – after 52 days at sea we arrived
with only 60 gallons less than we started with even though we showered nearly
every day and in the final week used water with the abandon of drunken sailors. Such a wide band of doldrums – in the weeks leading up to our crossing it had
been miniscule. After we got out it blossomed and seemed to follow us.
Things we expected but didn’t find – Big open ocean rollers
without steep cross chop.
Crossing the equator – We had grand plans for this but it
came at 02:22am Gratitouille time in the wee hours of Sun. April 5
th
and we were both tired. The on watch person let the off watch person sleep too close
to the big event and the off watch was still out of it enough that they thought
they were videoing and so didn’t worry about the quality of the still shots, so
we just have this blurry shot of the gps. No names named or fingers pointed,
stuff happens when you’re tired. You’ll just have to trust us. We’re
shellbacks!
We fed a shot of our hoarded St Martin Vanilla Banana Rum to
Poseidon, split one between the two of us and changed shifts.
Apparently he doesn’t appreciate that
delicacy as much as we do as he continued with the light winds and crazy cross
seas. Instead of the grand plans for a feast and treats that day, we celebrated
the triple fete of crossing the equator, Easter and having been out for 3 weeks
by resting and catching up on our sleep as the wind came up enough to get the
windvane working again! Though Darren did get his Easter Bunny milk!
Making landfall – After 52 and a half days of not motoring,
we were sweating it as the wind became very light mid morning and we weren’t
sure if we would make it in before dark. We started the motor just outside the
breakwall and had just enough light to set the hook before the sun disappeared
behind Mount Tevaitiu. Safe in Tahuku Bay on Hiva Oa Island in the Marquises,
French Polynesia!!
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| Land ho! East tip of Hiva Oa. |
Advice for future jumpers – Take several days’ worth of your
queasy tummy favorites even if you don’t normally get seasick.
Remember that you’ll want ginger ale rather
than Pepsi/Coke so you can sleep on your off watches.
Even if you normally make all of your food from scratch, try
to find a few things that you can just dump out of a can and heat up - or just
eat straight out of the can when even trying to corral a pot on the jerking
stove seems too much trouble!
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| Last fresh green beans salad |
Don’t save all your treats for tough days
and take more than
you would normally eat in the length of twice as long as you think your
crossing will take. On the days when nothing seems to be going your way a couple
of graham crackers and a marshmallow or packet of Cocanas can make your day. Use
lots of treats to make a celebration of any big or little thing to keep spirits
up. In our 52 days we celebrated 5 birthdays of loved ones back home, the first
day of spring for the northern hemisphere, Easter, April Fool’s, May Day, Cinco
de Mayo, one week out, 1, 2 and 3,000 miles, crossing the equator, seeing another
boat, the last fresh green beans, not having a new low noon to noon distance…towards
the end we celebrated every 10 degrees of progress! Treats that reminded us of
good friends were especially cherished, be they the cherry ginger jam Jodi made
with our friend Jonathan before we left Hood River or the quinoa and Toblerone
from our new friends on Red Thread and Meridian. Yummy
and reminders that we aren’t alone on the planet!
Non -food treats also contributed to our sanity levels. Take
audio files and a player for light wind nights when you have to hand steer or
are too tired to read a book and can’t stand another minute with your own
thoughts. Some of our favorites include light non-fiction, French lessons
(thank you Paula and Olivier!), and the talks by Tara Brach that our friend
Bethany of Lilo shared with us. When we had enough power to run the big
computer, ‘good luck’ and ‘news of their lives’ letters that friends had sent
and we had downloaded in Costa Rica just before we jumped were especially
bright spots for us!
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| A handful of the books that we devoured |
So what did we do all day? The first few days saw us
settling in, a process that took longer than it usually does for us. How much
of this was the weather and how much had to do with our state of mind as we
pondered options of destinations and plans, who knows? I’m sure the sadness at
missing birthdays and graduations, babies being born and all of the
celebrations of our friends and families that we were missing contributed to
our queasy stomachs.
Eventually, we got into the groove and were able to enjoy
the passing clouds, sea life and on calm days, the hour or two of each others’
company. Some days passed in a blur, when conditions had us hand steering and
stumbling exhausted to bed at the end of each shift to try and sleep among the
whacks, bangs and shudders of the chop tossed boat.
Or hiding below from salty splashes that
coated the entire boat with a layer of salt that ranged from the ‘misting of
sea salt’ on a good bag of peanuts to full on crystal gardens.
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| Self entertainment |
Other days were a wonderful flow of watching the ocean and
sky with their respective beautiful creatures, checking the guide to determine
which kind of dolphin or whale we had just seen, soaking it all in and
treasuring being on Gratitouille time. We also enjoyed experimenting with new
pressure cooker recipes and bread baking! When we were awake together we had
great talks about our lives, lessons learned and possible plans, along with
filling the other in on what they had missed in their off watch.
In the doldrums when we had lots of rain, we washed the
cockpit, ourselves and even some laundry in between refilling tanks and shower
jugs.
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| A calm moment |
As Thor Heyerdahl says in Kontiki, “…the horizon glided along
with us unnoticed as we moved and our own floating world remained always the
same – a circle flung up to the vault of the sky with the raft itself as
center, while the same stars rolled on over us night after night …The world was
simple – stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 BC or AD suddenly became of
no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized
that life had been full for men before the technical age also – in fact, fuller
and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution were
the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed
up in the absolute common measure of history – endless unbroken darkness under
a swarm of stars.”
And from one of Jodi’s early morning shifts, “What had been
a big dark rain cloud to the west of us has finished raining and is now a
laughing pink pig, full of joy, flying on his white feathered wings. As I look
closer at his wings, they transform before my eyes like an Escher drawing and
what I thought was the back of the pig is the head of a turtle swimming SW to
meet us. I am momentarily distracted and glance back at the head of the turtle
to find it is actually a dolphin (big melon type) and when my gaze returns to
the head of the turtle/dolphin, I discover that it has become a clown with a
Pinocchio type nose extension that his red ball nose is perched on. Or is it
Dumbo with a clown nose? I’ll never know. By the time I finished adjusting the
main sheet they were all gone, replaced (or merely obscured?) by a thick storm
cloud.”
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| Another amazing sunrise with rain ahead! |
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| Sigh |
Some of what we learned – See tips for future jumpers.
Also, from the Great Cornbread Debacle/Flying
Wallenda Caper - 'If the pitch and roll is so crazy that I’m afraid to wear the
safety strap for fear of being burnt by the hot oven gimballing into my legs,
perhaps it is too crazy to cook without the strap!' Actually, that was a twofer
as it also came with – 'Better to save the watery batter projects for calmer
conditions.' In those sort of conditions, even a gimbaled counter probably
wouldn’t have kept the batter from jumping over the sides of the pan!
Which led
to us eating pineapple out of a can for Mom R’s birthday instead of the
pineapple upside down cake that I had planned to celebrate with!
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| Darren claims the sweat, bruises and tears were worth it! |
Another birthday celebration later that same week saw us
enjoying cinnamon rolls for J’s birthday since we didn’t have cinnamon ice cream.
From Jodi’s journal that day, ‘ the cinnamon rolls were going to be a treat for
the next couple of days but it was too much temptation to have the rolls
sitting there hot and crispy and fluffy in front of us and before we knew it
the pan went from holding 8 giant puffy cinnamon rolls to only having two. Not
sure where they all disappeared to so fast. My bloated stomach seems to be
mumbling something about clues that I can’t quite make out.’
We just had
popcorn for supper that night.
Broken stuff - Jodi’s tea mug that has survived without a
scratch since she bought it in Pike’s Place Market at 16 and has moved around
the country with her got chipped in the first few days. As time went on it
seemed to have the worst luck of all of us as it dove off the counter again and
again. Darren super glued the handle back together 3 times and then we had
nearly given up on it when it was rescued by Del Viento showing up at Hiva Oa!
Mike lent us some Gorilla glue and saved it from a watery grave. Three weeks
later it’s still going strong, thanks Mike!
The repair on an old screw hole over Darren’s bunk opened up
while we were in the rainy doldrums and a piece of clear packing tape blocked
it so he could sleep till we could get somewhere drier!
A tiny leak around the mast and some line chafe rounded out
our small list of ‘issues’. We are
definitely grateful for such inconsequential ‘problems’.
Of course there is more, but for now, we need to get back to
work getting ready for our next crossing – to the Tuamotus! Hopefully it will
be calm and sunny (for electricity) enough that we can work on a post to let you
know what we’ve been up to for the past month!
Love,
Jodi and Darren
