Hola from the Central Pacific. Aloha soon…..
We are feeling pretty smug about our Excellent sailing performance. 😊 We are getting pretty good at this!
Sailing Wing onWing ( sail out on either side of the mast) on a broad reach to dead run now for 3 days. Wish we could have done it sooner but the seas were too disorganized and big prior.
We are working hard on our weather prediction. There’s no motivator for instant forecasting like big dark skies and they do provide instant feedback. As in ‘you got that right’ or not…..Its amazing how many localized weather systems move through each day and how quickly they move. Pretty frequent “squalls” of a lite nature and mini warm fronts with maxi rain. By the time we spot them, id and track them, they are overhead.
Case in point right now- the deep grey shelf of clouds on the horizon off our stern when the sun came up this am is right overhead now and the ipad keypad is sprinkled with the beginning of the showers. Cancel that- the cockpit is deluged. Wind veers round to south and picks up. Then immediately drops after.
We are using the engine a couple hours a day to recharge our batteries as we have 80-90% cloud cover each day and solar is unable to keep up. We are also trying to time running the engine with the wind lulls and use it to drive south as needed.
Last night we had our first external contact in 3 weeks- a 515’ ship ( oddly called the Connector) with a Norwegian captain called on our VHF to chat for a while. He was able to pronounce Tomten properly and I think our name may be why he called as it is pan-scandanavian for “little people”. He called around 11. It’s not like being on land- where you would hardly call a stranger to chat at 11 at night. “hi, I noticed your lights were still on. How are you doing?” Times and days flow differently out here.
It was fun to listen to Paul talking with him- Connector came thru the Panama canal, will stop in HI and then head to China and the Philippines for crew change ( their crew has been on board for 3 x normal length due to pandemic.). I wanted to ask if they had chocolate on board but refrained. It is comforting to know there are other ships nearby ( and a bit terrifying also)
By the way (postscript)~We had a lovely email from the Norwegian captain after we arrived in Hilo who took the time to look up our blog and reach out letting us know what sort of tattoos we qualify for, having made landfall in Hawaii under our own (or Tomten’s I should say) steam
Spirits are lifting as we get closer- four days to land now, including today. We are curious how HI will make an apperance on the horizon- will clouds announce the islands?
Hope you are all well. We are.
Sailing Tomten 