Someday I'd like to make a passage in faster than expected time. I do try to be conservative in my estimates, you know. Ardea's hull speed is 6.8 knots, though she has a hell of a time making it. When I first predicted I would make landfall Monday 19 November, I assumed I could maintain an average of five knots over the 1200 or so miles of the passage. For the last couple of thousand miles of passages in the trades, I've done that easily. I knew I was heading to the infamous horse latitudes, but I thought it would even out just the same. Not so. Not so.
Not long after sending in my last post the wind shut down and I motored again through the night. By morning I had to consider my fuel level carefully. I had probably about five gallons left in the tank, another fifteen on deck. I wanted to have a healthy amount of fuel for when I was near land, just on the off chance a surprise gale put me on a lee shore and I really needed power. So, I shut her down early in the morning and sat adrift. I checked in on the morning radio net and then I shut my alarm off and went to sleep. I slept for a good two hours straight, my longest run in over a week. It felt nice. Then I awoke and went about my day as though I were at anchor. The sea was totally flat save for a long swell, only a meter high. I drifted very slowly with the current, about half a knot east-southeast. I made some food, sat in the sun and read a book, went for a swim, all the normal things. It was really quite pleasant as long as I didn't think about not making any progress toward the destination. It still surprises me at times just how comfortable one can be with being out in the middle with nothing around for hundreds of miles; I have food and water, though, and the wind comes eventually.
I sat like that with not so much as a zephyr for most of the day. Eventually I got motivated and poured two of the three jerry-jugs of diesel into the tank, reserving the final one in case for whatever reason I accidentally burned through everything in the main tank before the final put into the harbor. Then I motored for two or three hours and then cut it and went adrift again, still not a drop of breeze. I made a drink of dark rum, fresh lime juice, a bit of sugar and water and drank it slowly, to avoid the scurvy, of course, while I chatted on the radio.
Shortly before dusk, I spotted something in the water and motored over to find a huge fender, from a tug or a super-yacht or something, I suppose. There were loads of fish hanging out twenty feet below it. That's the nice thing about the calms, you can see so much sea life. Little fish come and hang out beneath the boat, endless cnidarians- jellyfish and the like- drift by, the planktonic world comes alive, unobscured by the surface ripples of wind.
Just before dark, a tiny breeze came up. I hoisted all sails and started to ghost along, barely hitting two knots. It got better as the night went on though, filling in to an eight knot northwesterly. By morning I was making almost four knots and throughout today the swell has backed to follow the wind, though it's a tiny swell. I've made reasonably good progress today given the now incredibly diminished standards.
Today I continued to sail at about four knots in the same wind. I am fortunate to have made significant westing as Saltbreaker and a few other boats are further to the East, nearer the center of the gigantic High and have basically no wind. There were a few exciting events (ok, well, excitement is relative) that went on today. First was a visit by dolphins, which hadn't happened in a very long time. They were big fellows, too, and swam in the bow wake for a little while as I watched with delight.
The second occurred this afternoon. I was standing in the cockpit, staring into the distance when I spotted yet another thing in the water. It was just off the port bow so I altered course slightly and grabbed the boat hook. As I approached, I realized it was a life-sling, which is a man-over-board recovery device. It was attached to at least a hundred feet of nylon rope. I hooked it as I passed and tossed the flotation device and the attached harness onto the cabin top and coiled in the line. At the end of the line there were a couple of clusters of eggs, some black and some a translucent white. I grabbed a jar and filled it with sea-water and gently pulled the eggs off the line. They were attached by a very durable, stringy substance sort of like a spider's silk. I put them in the jar and closed the lid. Then, thinking about it, I figured it would get too warm in the jar, so I filled up the five-gallon bucket with water and opened the jar and put it down in the bucket.
I'm not totally sure why I decided to save the eggs; I really wanted to know what they were, but it seemed an unlikely outcome. In any case, it was only about half an hour later that they began to hatch. Soon hundreds of larvae- I believe they are fish larvae but I really don't know- were swimming around in the bucket. They were my new crew and I was very fond of them. I watched for a good long while as they swam about. I felt bad for the early-hatchers, so I poured them off, knowing that there were many more eggs yet to hatch. It was a strange feeling, pouring them out into the sea. It was where they belonged, and if I kept them they were certain to die; and yet, I knew that they were almost certain to die in the ocean, too. Their individual probability of survival was likely very very low, less than one percent, I'm sure. Most would end up as snacks, some maybe would metamorphose and become juvenile fish and then become snacks, and a very very few would survive to reproduce. I wonder still if those survivors would tell the tale of the giant reddish-brown air-fish that had freed them from the white-walled ocean. Perhaps I will live forever in the lore of the fish.
As I pondered all of this, and as the later-hatching individuals began to appear swimming about in a fresh batch of sea-water in the white-walled ocean, a ship appeared on the horizon. This was the third one I'd seen on this passage. It was a cruise-liner and, for a change, they actually responded on the radio. I think it was a New Holland cruise ship named the Amsterdam, but I could be mistaken as the guy on the bridge-watch was a little difficult to understand when he said the name. I did find out that they were headed to Fiji; I told him where I'd come from and where I was going and he wanted to know how long I'd been at sea. Most importantly, I asked if they had me on radar and he said that indeed they had a good read on me. That was a relief. Though they never came within five or ten miles of me, it's nice to know they could see me. Anyway, he was a nice fellow and it was good to have a chat.
That is the long and short of it. Another couple of days at sea. Just over nine now, in total. I've finally made that homemade pasta and also some banana bread for dinner. The weather continues to be fair and I'm still making about four knots. Tomorrow, the wind should pick up and I think I'll just make hull speed from here on out.
At this stage it is a race to see if I can make it to Opua by Wednesday night. If things improve dramatically in the next twenty-four hours, then it may actually work out. If not, at some point I will have to make the choice to slow the boat down deliberately and wait offshore for a front to pass on Wednesday night. It's a front that until today I expected to have some teeth to it. Mean winds as of yesterday were forecast to be in the low thirties, which means gusts in the low forties. Today, though, I got some weatherfax that show the low pressure system that is delivering the front being filled in by a high in the Tasman Sea. The pictures I got (called mean surface analysis) only show the pressure systems, they don't give any indication of wind speed, though the latter can be calculated by measuring the distance between isobars except in the instance of frontal weather. I'll have to wait until tomorrow morning's weather discussion on the radio to find out what the predicted speeds have become. I believe the punch will be significantly diminished, though, which is excellent news. In any case, I won't be making it in before Wednesday and probably not later than Thursday. Now about 350 miles to go. All is well aboard.
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