SV Yohelah – Pacific Loop

Life continues to return to normal here after the collision. We’ve gotten to know Michael and Gerald on Eva, the other boat that was hit, pretty well through all our trips to the Gendarmerie, chandlery, and other marine businesses. Nice thing about cruising is there is always a silver lining.

The gendarmes and other officials have been fabulous. When I was giving my statement I asked the gendarme if there was any chance we would have legal issues with the speed boat driver. He looked at me like I was truly crazy. It seems that here in French Polynesia when an unlit speedboat with a suspected drunk-on-his-ass driver speeds through a mooring field at night and hits an anchored boat or two and puts himself in the hospital, there is no attempt at shifting blame from the idiot driving the speed boat Refreshingly different from recent actions in backward, third world places like Mexico or Lake County, California. (BTW, has it occurred to anyone else that the Lake County prosecutor’s recent statements re: not being able to charge Perdoc because the drifting sailboat he flattened was driven by an intoxicated person means that the rest of Lake County’s deputy sheriffs have a free pass to crash into any boat driven by persons suspected of drinking? Lets hope boat ownership is relatively low in this particular population segment.)

The local businesses have also been extraordinary. Jean-Noel at Bora Bora Marine gave both boats repair estimates that were required to document the damage, at no cost. He couldn’t even expect repair business out of it because his shop doesn’t do the stainless, hull, or wood repairs required. After he dropped off our estimates he gave us a ride to the Gendarmerie. Gerald was in the front with Jean-Noel and convinced him to accept compensation for all his work on our behalf. Jean-Noel also called Raitea and set up my trip for stainless steel repairs. Today I took the express ferry over to Raitea, arriving at 9:30 am. Greg from ALUNOX Marine picked me up at the ferry terminal and drove me to the shop. He and Claude measured the lifelines and sent dimensions to a business in Papeete for a replacement estimate. By the time we left the shop at 12:45 for my one o’clock ferry back to Bora Bora, Claude had straightened one gate stanchion and welded new sections into the other two bent stanchions. They also firmed up the order for the lifelines and arranged shipment to Bora Bora for delivery next week. Never thought I’d have three fixed stanchions that quickly.

Arriving back in Bora Bora early, I met Teresa at the Gendarmerie where we learned our visa extension had been approved and we received our official extension, good until Sept 10th! Jean-Luc Chombart, the Commandant, provided assistance in writing letters, faxing all required docs to the officials in Papeete, and calling several times to keep things moving. None of this is the responsibility of the gendarmes, he was just helping us out. A very successful day, indeed, thanks to the locals.

It looks like the repairs, not counting my time, are going to cost us around $500. I don’t mind though. When I think back to Monday night, that single moment when we were tracking the speedboat with the spotlight and it was a second or two from an inevitable collision with us, it would have never occured to me that we would have a fixed boat again for only 500 bucks.

That’s it for now, I think I’m ready to be done with the collision aftermath. The diversion the past week has had its interesting moments but seems to have consumed the last 4 days with no time left for anything else. We’ll have to remedy that and switch over to tourist mode. I only wish Michael and Gerald on Eva were as close to finished as we are.

Today on Yohelah we are tired but happy to have the repairs under control and ready to discuss dive sites rather than collision sites.

Rob

We’ve received a lot of very good advice from many people who’ve read about our encounter with a speedboat. As a result we will be taking a careful look at the inside of the hull and our bulkheads to ensure there is no hidden damage. I believe additional damage is unlikely because of the nature of the impact.

The speedboat hit us at half the speed he hit Eva, probably because of operator and boat damage. Our AB Aluminum RIB was hanging on our port side with the tubes just below the cap rail, tied fore and aft. The speedboat hit the inflatable first, flipping it sideways as seen in the first photo we posted. I believe the deep vee bow of the inflatable pushed the speed boat up and forward, impacting our cap rail and lifelines. The energy of the collision was dissipated through our lifelines and stanchion and by the shredding of the plywood hull as it chewed its way over our bulwarks. We really didn’t have a classic T-bone with the bone jarring impact as reported by Eva. In fact, when the boat hit us we felt no boat movement at all.

Inspection of our inflatable revealed one small dent on the bottom near the tube/hull join, not worth repairing. The next time I have hypalon glue mixed I’ll probably slap a patch over the slight abrasion in the hypalon.

Our damage has been luckily minor, thankfully because of the nature of the impact and the construction of both boats.

Rob

Limits…

We’ve had a few years of living aboard and traveling in our sailboat but we still occasionally chafe at the limitations imposed by our house. Recently we were discussing the employment opportunities in New Zealand versus the US, along with the difference in salaries and taxes. Looking at a two year ‘work’ break, we felt we’d be financially better off working in Seattle than New Zealand. The downside? A 5000 mile sail to get home. On the other hand, it isn’t that hard to get back to the South Pacific from Seattle, a quick jump to Southern California and then another puddle jump, this time 2400 miles to French Polynesia. Didn’t sound that bad. We’d be the only people in Seattle waiting to go cruising who’d have a boat that was actually ready!

Next step, can we personally do it? Neither of us were enthralled with a 2400 mile voyage to Hawaii, then another 2400 miles to Seattle. The Hawaii/Seattle leg would actually be much longer since we would travel in a large arc north. We decided we were still game.

Next step, will the weather allow it? Well, it was the last week of August. The Northern Pacific gets pretty nasty in the fall and winter, it didn’t have to work too hard to earn the moniker ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’. We would want to get to Washington in early October. Figure 30 days from Hawaii, better leave early September. Hmm, need to get to Hawaii.

Call me a name dropper, but the area between southern Mexico and Hawaii is “Hurricane Alley” and we’d have to cross it. A month ago a fellow Baba 40 left Bora Bora to return to San Diego via Hawaii, a much easier proposition than heading for Seattle. A month later they were still not to Hawaii yet, sitting on Christmas Island waiting for a break in the Hurricanes, tropical depressions, and troughs traveling across from Mexico. They just left Christmas for Hawaii a couple of days ago and will probably take two weeks. The best we’d have done is crossing with them, although we would have been hard pressed to get to Christmas in time so may have been waiting for the next weather window. Once in Hawaii it would have been late September. Rest, provision, fuel, and get ready for another long passage? Oh wait, need a short break in the weather to get far enough north of Hawaii to miss hurricanes. There were already two large lows in the Gulf of Alaska.

So now it wasn’t a voyage home, but a sail to Hawaii that may take until November, which is when sane people cross to Hawaii. Once there we’d have to re-evaluate and decide whether going further north was feasible. Odds would be we wouldn’t want to risk the weather so would either be stuck in Hawaii or would have to head back to somewhere around the equator to wait until next spring. When we found ourselves checking historic hurricane paths and water temp patterns we realized that maybe this idea had taken a life of its own, grabbed the wheel, and veered off into the giggly bushes. Sailboat routing had always told us you don’t go from the South Pacific to the Northern Pacific in late summer and fall, we knew better.

So it was a happy fantasy for a few days, fortunately reason kicked in, aided by a few emails from fellow sailors in response to Teresa’s email telling them we were looking into traveling back to Seattle. Most responses outlined many of the facts above. No one thought it was a good idea. One sailor here who has made the trip from the South Pacific to the west coast of the US three times simply looked at us and said, “Too Late”.

On to New Zealand.

And while we’re talking about the weather…

We know we won’t get a lot of sympathy from anyone when we whine “we’re tired of Bora Bora” but I’ll do it anyway, because we are. We just passed a month. The first two and a half weeks seemed consumed with the accident and repairs. Then we spent a week being tourists, biking and diving. We came back to the Bora Bora Yacht Club for another trip to the store prior to leaving. We’ve now been here another ten days watching horrid weather between here and the Cook Islands.

It’s hard when you are a cruiser and have sailed to the South Pacific to sit in one place this long because of weather. Most of what is forecast is max winds of 30 knots and 15-20 foot seas. It’s hard to sit, but harder to knowingly sail into that sort of forecast, especially when experience tells us the winds will be stronger than forecast, the seas higher. Last night someone mentioned a boat getting impatient and leaving an island in the Cooks for Tonga; they had a horrible passage and wished they’d waited. There are probably 20 boats sitting here waiting to leave. One left yesterday, a few are planning tomorrow. We’re thinking Tuesday might look good. We’re all looking at the same forecasts and websites, none of us are seeing conditions we like. If we sail a long way out of our way north we get better weather. At some point we’ll just have to go, it isn’t weather we haven’t seen before, just weather we know is an uncomfortable ride. One of the cruising guides calls this “The Dangerous Middle” of the South Pacific, I call it “The Frustrating Middle”.

And then there’s Maya…

Getting tired of the wait for weather, Maya decided to strike out for the Cooks on her own. This morning Teresa woke me up yelling from the deck. I arrived on deck to the sound of a cat howling. We discovered on our last trip to the vet that Maya can out yell a 15hp Merc running wide open and she wasn’t far off this morning. Arriving on deck I decide a quick swim sounded good so went in. While I was in I detached the cat from the bobstay (the wire rigging that goes from our bow sprit and the waterline) and handed her up to Teresa.

We’re not sure how she ended up in the water but it was clear she didn’t like it. She seems a little shaky but generally OK. Our fastidious cat now has a lot of cleaning to do, despite the freshwater rinse we gave her.

Once everyone was safe we realized we had no pictures. Rats. A ‘re-enactment’ was considered but rejected since it would be too hard on us. The cat still has her claws.

The biggest problem is we discovered Maya cannot climb the rope ladders we made and deployed specifically for this purpose. She tried but the rope ladder spun around and she gave up, swimming to the bow and grabbing on to the only thing she could.

Sounds like we need to re-design the cat saving gear, probably using some wood pieces for rigidity wrapped in rope for traction. Back to the hardware store.

It’ll give us something to do while we wait for the weather to get better, if it ever does.

Today on Yohelah we have cabin fever, or is it ‘island fever’?

Niue has been a rolly anchorage the last few days, as has been the landing at the quay. The swell has been from the south and rolled through the anchorage and onto the wharf. Since there is no harbor here, there is no place to leave even dinghies in the water. Every time we go ashore we raise our dinghy onto the concrete wharf with the provided crane. The last few days, with 4-5 foot waves rolling past the crane and breaking 10 feet away our landings have become the stuff of Olympic legends. Yesterday we decided we’d had enough rolling and checked out, planning on leaving today for Tonga.

At breakfast this morning Niue Radio broadcast a Tsunami alert to all the yachts on anchor. We quickly raised and secured the dinghy, started the engine, and cast off our mooring. We followed Nine of Cups to deeper water, ourselves followed by three other boats. In case you didn’t know, Tsunamis are virtually unfelt by boats in deeper water, it’s only when approaching a shoreline that the wave achieves its potential in height and power. The bottom quickly dropped off to hundreds, and then thousands of feet. Safe once again.

We are now hearing bits and pieces about the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis. With friends on sailboats in both Samoa and American Samoa we are anxiously waiting word on how everyone is doing, and how the local communities are fairing. Tsunamis can travel as fast as 600 miles per our, so American Samoa wouldn’t have had much, if any, warning. On Niue we had twenty minutes of warning, our warning was slow enough that we were actually still on our buoy twenty minutes after the earthquake hit. Whew!

Today on Yohelah we’re happy the tsunami went the other way and praying all is well for our friends in Samoa….

Rob and Teresa

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We have arrived in Tonga and have been re-acquainted with many friends of the past couple of years and even more tsunami stories. When I was a kid we used to call these tidal waves. Everyone is quick to point out they aren’t related to tides and should therefore be called ‘tsunami’. Since ‘Tsunami’ is Japanese for ‘Harbor Wave’ I don’t think it’s any better – a tsunami is a wave practically undetectable out in deep water and only becomes a wave as it approaches shore. Since it becomes apparent in a harbor or tidal zone it seems like either name should work, but we’ll stick with ‘tsunami’.

One of the most gripping accounts was one Teresa emailed to family earlier, that of SV Gallivanter which is here:

http://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/lectronicday.lasso?date=2009-09-30&dayid=331

Also, a three part report from another boat at the same dock starts here:

http://learnativity.typepad.com/living_learning_aboard_th/2009/10/doing-the-tsunami-tango-in-american-samoa-part-i.html

Additionally, boats on anchor around where we are now had a few scary stories, mostly smaller surges that caused temporary groundings and heart stopping moments while trying to get things back under control.

We saw our friends Rob and Marjo of the Dutch sailboat ‘Taremaro’ along with Heinz and Silvia of the Austrian sailboat ‘Gallathe’ who were both in Niutoputapu, Tonga. Niutoputapu was the hardest hit area of Tonga with 90% of the town wiped out by a tsunami. Fortunately they were leaving early to head to Vava’u, ‘Taremaro’ was in the pass leaving the harbor when the earthquake struck, ‘Gallathe’ was raising their anchor. Both boats made it to deeper water. After ‘Gallathe’ went through the pass they looked back and watched the harbor drain of water to the point the pass they had just left through was high and dry! The inrush of water pushed both boats back toward shore but they were able to overcome the current and stay offshore. When the wave entered the harbor the sailboat ‘Happy Spirit’ hadn’t made it out the pass before it went dry. As a fifteen foot wave approached across the harbor they were heard on the VHF saying they were going to lose the boat. Fortunately, the wave didn’t break or drive them back toward the beach. They were able to ride over the wave, escape, and are now happily on a mooring here in Vava’u.

The saddest tsunami report for us personally is of Dan on Mainly, who was swept away trying to free his boat from the wharf in Pago Pago. Joan, his wife, was able to motor the boat to deeper water until it was safe to return to the wharf. Ironic that both Joan and the boat were unscathed. Sad that she discovered his body when they brought it to the morgue at the local hospital. Sad. And of course, we shouldn’t forget that over 130 other people who lost their lives, mostly due to the tsunami.

No matter how much time, energy, and money we spend preparing for our adventures, securing our homes, and protecting our loved ones, it is humbling to find it all overcome in a heart beat by a simple act of nature. The devastation and havoc from one earthquake is staggering, the human toll unfathomable.

Rob

We posted a photo of a billboard for a Piggery on Niue on the Baba Cam a few days ago. When we first saw it I was perplexed why a pig would be present for a haircut. Teresa cut my hair on the boat while we were there, no pig was necessary. I then realized all items were special occasions. On Niue an ear piercing is a ‘coming of age’ event for young girls. So all items listed are special events for which a pig is offered.

Since the first item is a pig for sale I wonder if the follow on items are something different? Pigs for entertainment? A dancing pig? A pig circus? Having never been to a hair cutting or ear piercing we really can’t be sure, but I suspect all listed events bode poorly for the pig involved.

Rob
Niue is here

This has been a slow passage so far. On most of our South Pacific passages we were wishing for a little less wind at times. We could use a little more. We’ve only had one day above our normal average miles while on passage, and that was the first day out of Tonga. Our slowest so far was an 85 mile day that would have been 65 miles if not for the 9 hours of motor assisted sailing that increased our speed by a couple of knots.

The most fascinating thing on this passage has been the thunderstorms. The equatorial sun is merciless and evaporates a lot of water into the air. Around midnight the air has cooled enough that the clouds start to grow. By 3 am it has cooled more and the growth is rapid, almost cartoon like. Thunderstorms sprout up all around us, towering thousands of feet in the air and producing rain that looks like a black, impenetrable curtain across the water. With a full moon, it’s been hard to miss even in the middle of the night. While our radar cannot see clouds, it can show the rain, which is how we track thunderstorm locations. A couple of nights ago we had just dodged one thunderstorm when another appeared off our starboard side, on a converging course. With one thunderstorm off our beam, another 5 miles behind us and another 4 miles ahead, I decided to veer to the right and duck behind the one closing, guessing I had enough room to cross in front of the next. Burning precious diesel. I approached the middle thunderstorm, staring up at the towering clouds. The radar showed the curtain of rain at a mile off the port beam as we passed through the black clouds above us. We popped through to the other side, and continued off course until the next thunderstorm looked like it was safely past. Twenty minutes later the clouds and rain filled in between the three thunderheads, producing a black mass of rain 12 miles long and 2 miles wide. It took two hours and, combined with Teresa’s c-shaped dodging of another thunderstorm earlier, contributed to 15 miles of sideways non-progress that day.

The opposite happens during the day. The afternoon before, we had another ugly thunderstorm on a converging course form the east. I first saw it on radar at 24 miles, and watched as it grew closer and closer. At 5 miles (two hours later) it was still closing but looked like it was raining itself out. At three miles, the rain stopped, and fifteen minutes later the cloud literally disappeared into thin air (actually it disappeared into thick, muggy air) as the relentless sun evaporated the remaining moisture It truly looked surreal.

So why do we dodge them? The bigger ones have their own wind systems that are independent of the prevailing wind. Entering a squall or thunderstorm can produce violent and erratic winds of 30, 40, 50 knots or more. I have to say the winds in these don’t appear to be too bad, somewhere in the 20 knot range. Another fear is water spouts. We’ve not seen any on this passage but on our passage across the equator and into the Galapagos we passed a squall 3 miles off our beam that had three waterspouts. They didn’t get close, neither did we. Additionally, the rain is amazing. It rains so hard it flattens the wind waves, leaving a glossy swell behind. The rain makes a white mist as it hits, producing a solid white foam at the surface, looking for all the world like snow. If we can, we prefer to avoid them. When it takes us to far afield, we go through them. It’s like beating your head against a brick wall, it always feels so good to reach clear air on the other side.

We’re sailing wing-on-wing with the spinnaker pole on the jib. We can actually fly this combination easily from dead down wind to wind 110 degrees off the bow on the starboard side. Any further forward and the danger of backwinding the jib increases. If the forecast holds we should have another day of this before we take down the pole and shift the jib to the port side for a nice beam reach for a day or two. If the forecast holds, we’ll see.

There is a huge fleet of cruising boats heading for New Zealand right now. It was hard to turn north as the majority of our friends turned south toward New Zealand. After a big end-of-season party in Nuku’Alofa on the thirtieth of October many boats headed south. Unfortunately, a huge high pressure system has formed between New Zealand and Tonga so there is no wind to sail. Since most cruising boats have a motoring range of between 300-600 miles, many boats have stopped at Minerva Reef, a popular ‘no-dry-land’ anchorage 800 miles from New Zealand. We just received an email from friends reporting over 20 boats anchored in Minerva, and the number is growing. The high pressure system is building stronger, which may be unfortunate. The low pressure systems still keep coming off the southern ocean and are starting to stack up. This will produce a squash zone between systems of very high winds. It will be interesting to see what weather develops around Minerva Reef when this high moves on, and what progressions of lows are produced. Personally, I’d rather be here.

Today on Yohelah we’re sweltering in the Equatorial sun, as opposed to the reports of foulies and fleeces from the majority of the boats that left Vava’u with us but heading south and now approaching New Zealand.

Rob
The boat is here

The first part of this passage was a little disappointing from a fishing perspective, especially for boat cat Maya. We trolled and caught nothing. As we left atolls and sea mounts behind the odds of finding fish in the middle of no where dwindled. Maya has been directing fishing operations lately, partly to alleviate boredom and partly to ensure we are doing everything we can to catch fish.

We lost the first Mahi Mahi we hooked on one of our green and yellow ‘octopus’ squids while bringing it aboard. Maya was most disgusted. Later that same afternoon we had another bungee explosion as something way too big snatched another of our green and yellow octopi, breaking the 100 pound test SS leader. I was sad to lose a stainless hook and some plastic beads, both rare in the stores of the South Pacific – I have plenty more squids (Yamamshita OCTOPUS size#55 in green/yellow seem to be working very well for us.) Fortunately, the next day we landed two Mahi Mahi, followed by one more yesterday. This has given us another successful lure, a blue and white skirt attached to a faux-pearl head with rhinestone eyes I found in a store in the Marquesas. Maya is ecstatic, glad we finally managed to overcome our clumsiness and pull some fish onboard. I’m her best buddy when I’m cleaning a fish, she will eat sashimi until she gets sick.

Perhaps hubris at our current fishing success, we have deployed the 8″ cedar plug, which was deadly against the larger Mahi Mahi in Central America. It would be nice to land enough meat to fill the freezer before stopping tomorrow.

Not sure if she is sensing the end of the passage or if all the fresh Mahi Mahi has picked up her spirits, but Maya seems a bit less bored than just a few days ago. For an outdoor night cat passages are an endurance for her. She still doesn’t like all the noises the boat makes as it plods along in it many different configurations. A pile of pillows topped with a blanket gives her a quiet place to ‘hide’, some days she never comes out. All will be back to normal in another day as we close in on Majuro. All three of us will be happy to have our slowest passage behind us.

Rob

The weather…

Between sailing the west coast of the America’s, long passages in the South Pacific, and crossing the equator four times we have experienced a lot of different weather and sailing conditions. Sailing across the Pacific has been challenging at times but very educational. We are truly different sailors than when we started out four years ago.

We have always avoided storms, ensuring we are safely ensconced in the northern hemisphere during hurricane season in the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. When we left Majuro to head across Micronesia, we entered an area of active hurricane formation for the first time cruising. Why? There is no off-season here. Well, technically there is, the off season is the same as for the rest of the North Pacific, which we are currently in. However, this area of Micronesia still spawns cyclones in the off season. A little over a week ago a cyclonic disturbance formed between Pohnpei and Chuuk, 1000 miles to the east of us. At the time we arrived in Yap the weather professionals were ‘watching’ the disturbance to see if it was likely to gain strength and move off towards us or dissipate toward the equator. They have several ‘models’ they use to predict future behavior, one was showing it developing into a storm system and heading north west towards us. This was the situation when we arrived in Yap. Four days later it HAD developed into a tropical depression and was moving west. By the end of our first weekend on Yap we were sure it was coming our way, the only question was it’s exact path.

The winds in tropical storms and cyclones in the northern hemisphere rotate counter-clockwise and the whole storm system travels between 10 and 20 knots. Since the winds rotate counterclockwise, the storm winds on the right side are enhanced by the 10-20 knots of storm movement. If the storm is moving at 15 knots, then the winds on the right side are 15 knots faster. The opposite is true on the left side of the storm. These winds are blowing into the winds caused by the storm movement and so have the 15 knot storm speed subtracted from their speed. The end result is a 30 knot difference in wind speed based on which side of the storm hits you – you may remember this from when Katrina ran over New Orleans they were hit by the fiercer, right side of the hurricane.

With the storm a couple of hundred mile away NOAA was predicting a path for our tropical depression that went south of Yap, putting us on the more dangerous side of the storm. It was officially a tropical storm at this point, with winds over 40 knots. It was moving at 15 knots, giving us a 30 knot difference in wind from one side to the next. We all had our fingers crossed that the storm would veer north and give us the good side. It slowed down and indeed started veering more northerly, eventually passing 50 miles to the north of Yap. We were spared the higher winds, the peak we saw was 38 knots with most of the wind in the 20-30 knot range. And so we weathered our first tropical storm.

Luck…

An Australian catamaran left Yap the day we arrived. We hadn’t met them but were sad to see them leaving because they had spent a lot of time in our next stop, Palau, and were a wealth of information. Fortunately they briefed mutual friends in the anchorage and so we have benefited from their knowledge. Before they left Yap one of the other sailboats asked them about the cyclonic disturbance around Chuuk, they thought an atoll would be better than being in Yap.

When the storm veered north and spared us it’s stronger side it just about ran over Ulithi atoll, where the Australians were set to weather the storm. Our good luck was their bad luck as they were hit with the strongest winds and seas from the tropical storm. They reported massive waves coming over the boat and lost two anchors. The boat ended up drifting across the atoll and ran aground on the reef, virtually destroying the boat. The good news is the couple and their two young daughters survived, bad news is the state of the boat. At last report it was still in the surf zone on top of the reef with the hull breached. They are attempting to get the boat off the reef and have committed the next six months to rebuilding the boat.

Risk management…

Sailing a boat around the Pacific is an exercise in risk management. I was just reading the January edition of Latitude 38, the San Francisco sailing magazine, marvelling at the letters criticizing the decisions of a boat in the South Pacific that was caught in a hurricane and destroyed in Fiji. I love armchair sailors and Monday morning quarterbacks, just not combined in the same person. It strikes me as arrogant to question someone else’s decisions when you are not in the same part of the world and do not have the burden of decision making in the same conditions as the boat. Seems to me the only critic should be someone else on the same boat, and not in a magazine.

Everyone out here does the best they can with what’s on hand. With mediocre holding in a small harbor surrounded by reefs there may have been a few more problems in Yap if the storm hadn’t veered. We’ll never know, but it did make me wish for a couple of more anchors and another hundred feet of chain. We already carry three anchors, 400 feet of chain, and 600 feet of rope rode, but traveling in an area of active tropical disturbances is a bit different than the off-season traveling we’ve done up ’til now. We’ll add more anchors.

Our boat is much heavier than a catamaran and carries much heavier anchoring gear. We also have less windage, less surface area exposed to the wind. All this means we are much less likely to drag in storm conditions. Our heavier boat also weathers large seas and high winds better than light catamarans, making the option of weathering a storm at sea much more attractive. So what would we have done? I don’t know, and won’t know until we are in those conditions. And our decision will be based on the strengths of our boat, so the correct decision for two boat in the same place at the same time can still be different, and still correct for both boats.

No Monday morning quarterbacks need apply.

Today on Yohelah we are surrounded by land in Palau…

Rob

Sailing upwind, fishing, and low pressure systems

All cruisers know there is an old adage “Gentlemen do not sail to weather” that we all like to repeat when someone is planning to go somewhere upwind. We also know quite a few cruisers who have lamented their boats do not sail to weather very well, so all their destinations are downwind. Definitely limits ones options when deciding where to go.

We expected some upwind work on this passage, just not as much as we have had. The first two days were fine, beating into light winds. 10 knots does not create much wave action so we actually travel faster sailing into 10 knots than away from it, as long as the seas are commensurate with the wind. The light winds during the middle part of the passage were frustrating. Nothing is worse than hours of sailing at 2 knots. We starting looking forward to seeing some wind in a forecasted low that was traveling east ahead of us.

We caught one fish, a mackerel which fed us for two days and Maya for a week. Unfortunately, trolling while sailing at 2 knots isn’t productive, so we didn’t fish for most of the passage. We so wanted one last Mahi before leaving warm water…

With two days warning of inclement weather we probably over analyzed the coming low. Since we were out of the tropics and there were two highs above the approaching low to keep it from heading north, we decided to make all possible speed north so we we would be on the north side of it. Because the winds were still in the 4-6 knot range making all possible speed required running our engine, burning precious diesel.

It worked, when the winds came they were just south of east, telling us we were in the right place north of the low. We sailed with the increasing winds until it turned northeast. At this point we were 347 miles south of Osaka and 20 miles east of our route, with about 200 miles of sea room to the west before we’d smack into the southern islands of Japan. We ‘hove to’, stopping most boat movement, in order to preserve both the sea room to the west and our progress to the north. We were ‘stopped’ for 12 hours and lost 2 miles south and 17 miles west. Not bad. Once we started sailing again the seas and wind forced us another 10 miles west before they rotated around and allowed us to sail north again. 300 miles to go, 64 gallons (out of 140) of diesel left on board.

Who would have thought we would hit more stormy weather a day or so later? The winds built into the high 20′s with gust over 30. We are on the western edge of our weather charts and wouldn’t necessarily see a new low approaching. The winds were easterly, telling us there must be another low south of us. Given the wind strength it felt bigger than the one we had already weathered. Teresa found a surface analysis weather fax to receive via the SSB and sure enough, there was a giant low below us. Because the winds were more easterly we were able to continue sailing north, albeit slowly with only a reefed main. We later added the engine and increased our speed to 5 knots, believing there was lighter winds further north.

The winds above the low were more variable than the first, giving multiple wave trains from a couple of different directions. When two waves cross each other their height is the height of both waves added together. We were taking salt water spray as high as the wind generator and the occasional wave crashing into the boat sounded like a Buick smashing into us. At one point I was sitting in the companionway watching the waves and looked up in time to see water 10 feet above the side of the boat, and we weren’t rolling with it. It was the first time we’ve taken a wave through the dodger and into the companionway. The dishes in the cabinets behind the stove had sea water in them!

We managed to get far enough north to lose the effects of this second low and managed a couple days of pretty decent sailing. We’re now approaching Osaka Bay as the wind goes lighter and lighter. Good news is we have enough diesel to motor the rest of the way if necessary. Bad news is the ship traffic we are seeing over a hundred miles away seems busier than any we’ve seen before. Never been so happy to have AIS.

Today on Yohelah we’re preparing for landfall in Japan.

Rob