With a week of the crossing behind us, the days past with each moment feeling like an eternity of sailing purgatory through the uncomfortable conditions. With a 5-mile visual radius, the scenery didn’t change much from day to day, just an endless waterline on the 360° horizon. Even though we were in the middle of the largest ocean in the world, and at one point we were closer to the International Space Station than to any point on land, in the back of my mind I kept telling myself land was just around the corner.
The names of the days no longer had any meaning. Now the days are known by any variation from the normal. For example, Day 9 was the day of the boobies. As we got farther and farther from land, I was continuously amazed that seabirds could exist this far from their land-based homes. The most common bird was a type of brown booby, slightly less whimsical than their colorful blue footed cousins that we saw in Mexico. One morning, I was surprised to find two boobies had taken refuge on our solar panels. Sympathizing with their lack of rest, we decided to leave them alone until we saw the massive poop piles they were depositing on the solar panels. I shooed them away with the boat hook and cleaned off the panels but they persistently returned.
Eitan decided that if they wanted to stay on the panels, they needed to be trained to poop off the back. Eitan and Martin took turns poking the birds until they oriented themselves correctly and eventually learned to sit butt side out. This was all fun and games for some time but eventually two boobies turned into three, which turned into four, and by the end of the day we had seven boobies on the solar panels! They continued to be fun to watch, especially as the boat heeled over and it turned into a kind of booby bowling, with one bird on the windward side losing his footing and sliding across the panels, knocking a couple of his friends off, then returning to do it again. Eitan began to ponder the weight of a single bird and estimated we had close to 50 pounds of boobies which the panels certainly weren’t rated for and had begun to warp. We were sad to see them go, but with a little tough love, they got the message that they were no longer welcome aboard.
By Day 11, I’m not sure if the conditions got much calmer or if I was just so exhausted that I could sleep through anything, but I finally got a good amount of sleep and was feeling a slight return of my sanity. I tried to cook more, mostly because any fresh provisions that hadn’t gone bad already soon would. To get through the Costo-sized bag of broccoli, we cooked up some broccoli cheddar soup which we turned into a pasta dish, since eating that amount of butter, cheese, and dairy by itself didn’t seem like the best way to replenish calories.
As we continued south towards the equator, the sky became increasingly cloudy each day as the humidity increased. Now, we needed to be on the lookout for small storms, or squalls, that could increase wind speeds up to 30 knots within a few minutes, as reported by our friends ahead. During my night shift, I started to feel some sprinkles and woke up Eitan to get the sails reefed and windows shut. We threw on our rain gear and got ready for whatever was on its way. The shower passed as quickly as it came and there was hardly enough rain to rinse off the salt that had caked onto the deck. Afterward, I looked out at the clouds and saw a mysterious shape. It looked like there was a perfect circular arch of light gray over the darker clouds. With a near-full moon, I realized the light from the moon was creating a kind of night rainbow, just without the full spectrum of colors the sun would produce. What a strange, rare and beautiful phenomenon.
We continued to be on squall watch and kept our eyes glued to the radar and horizon for any signs of unstable weather. Later that day we had the strongest storm of the trip which gave us a good soaking and 25 knots of wind, our maximum wind speed for the entire crossing. The storm, like most, only lasted a few minutes and quickly passed us by. Compared to our friends, we hardly had any substantial rain during our passage.
Day 13 was our halfway day and this time I tried making brownies to commemorate the event. These seemed to stay in the pan much better than the Week 1 lemon bars. To continue the celebration, we threw a trash cutting party which was really just cutting up the trash and stuffing it into the two 5-gallong jugs we used as our receptacles to manage smell. We did our best to keep the trash as clean as possible, all organic matter and glass went overboard and anything remaining was washed and dried.
Reaching the halfway point was a good feeling, knowing we were approaching land instead of getting farther away from it. We also happened to be halfway through our fuel, which was concerning considering we had just entered the doldrums, the area near the equator notorious for light winds. This area is called the “Horse Latitudes” because historically, it wasn’t uncommon to find floating dead horses that had been thrown overboard to conserve water during slow passages. It was a bit alarming for me to think we had already used half of our fuel just to keep the battery charged. None the less, with the wind dropping off, we began our first full day of motoring.
To make matters worse, motoring at 1200 RPM should have given us a speed of about 5 knots but we were struggling to even make 3 knots. We stopped the boat to shower and discovered the entire back half of the boat was covered in gooseneck barnacles, 1-2 inches long! I got in the water with Eitan and Martin and we did our best to scrub and scrape as many barnacles off as we could. Cleaning the bottom helped us speed up by 1 knot almost instantly. However, we also discovered that there was a 2-knot opposing current pushing us backwards which was made apparent by our backtracking on the chart plotter while we were cleaning the bottom. Two weeks was officially behind us, but with these conditions it was impossible to predict how much longer it would take us to get to the Marquesas Islands.
I loved your description of the moon rainbow.