Notes from Midnight Watch

The wind has pickup to a nice steady 12-15 knots. The wind direction allows us to head North, but not very well NE, and maybe not as speedily or comfortably as a more favorable direction would. 

But we are Doing The Thing! We are sailing across an ocean! We are courageous wayfinders. (I'm very grateful not to be a bold explorer. I think the stress would kill me.)

It was the perfect catch for ocean-to-table dining. 

(Wanna hear something silly? Right after Jeff landed and fileted his fish, I went to go sit in the shade on the bow, with a book, and -- I got a fish, too!! LOL There was a flying fish that got stranded on the net between the hulls. Poor thing.)

We are learning by observation and testing more about the ship's batteries, how they charge and discharge, how the reporting panel measures and shares information. 

It's a good thing that Torsten has been doing so much research on boat batteries and that Jeff is a terrific power engineer. They know a LOT. (And I totally don't.) Speaking of which, I better go check on some things... brb. 

All is well. 

Fun fact: 

Fresh tuna blood glows in the dark. 

Wanna know how I know? There is a dirty zip lock bag on the table over there; it had a 1/2 of a fish in it a few hours ago. Gross, right? Anyway, it's sitting there GLOWING. It's like from Scooby-Doo or something.

And with that, I'll say goodnight! 

Hasta mañana!

Love and Light,

~e.

Hana Paa!!!!

Fish on!!!!!

Fish scales

Yesterday, Doing a walk around the boat inspection in the morning, and Jeff finds a pile of fish scales, and a kinda splat mark on the cabin roof.

Eeew!

Torsten reported hearing so.ething go bump in the night. Haha! Poor surprised flying fish...

Imagine that poor fish. Wheeee! Whump! What the?!.! LOL

~e.

Typos

I reread the email I sent last night. So many typos. Sorry, friends. Bear with me! :)

First off: * right * we were going north, we turned to the east, that is a *right* turn. LOL. 

If I could, I'd go in and edit these things... sigh. Color me embarrassed.

Here's a pretty first star at sunset picture. :)

~e.

Fishing

This boat came with some fishing gear, and Jeff brought some. 
Today we dropped a couple lines and are trolling as we sail. 
We had one quick curious hit, but did not hook up. 
I'll let you know how that goes. :)

Typos

I reread the email I sent last night. So many typos. Sorry, friends. Bear with me! :)

First off: * right * we were going north, we turned to the east, that is a *right* turn. LoL.

If I could, I'd go in and edit these things... sigh. Color me embarrassed.
~e.

Detour!

I don't know if yall can tell from our track on NoForeignLand, but we made a pretty hard left turn and ran east for a while last night.

When I posted the "golden hour" log entry, a note came in from my Dad.

He informed us that he could see on a MarineTraffic.com website that there was a cluster of AIS targets directly in our projected path.

In our preparation for this passage Jeff and I had read reports about fishing practices in this region. What my dad described in his email was consistent with reports of Chinese fishing boats leaving to drift, or towing a long net, and marking the net with buoys that transpond an AIS identification signal.

My dad sent several emails with clear description of how many, how far apart and how long all together... and where we were projected to intercept. Text book traffic control!

We had some funky latency delays in our email exchanges... but! We had a pretty good idea what we were looking for.

At the local level: weak sea-level buoy transponders and the not incredibly powerful antenna that we have on the mast, meant that we didn't pick up the targets until they were about 6 miles away.

At which point we already had a plan.
We furled (automatically rolled up on the foreatay) our jib, tightened up on the mainsail, fired up an engine, and turned east. We ran a course that anticipated would take us along the net (a few miles distant) to what we thought was the end, after the last buoy.

That's when I went to bed. And when I came back up for my midnight watch, the guys were shutting down the engine, setting the sails, and heading north again.

Just a little 4 hour maneuvers drill. These are your prayers in action folks!! We got to run east. We avoided what may or maynot have been a thing* we had some ideas of what was out there even though we couldn't see a thing!

* the net could have been at se significant depth that we wouldn't have noticed of we'd crossed it... but then again... maybe not! We could have hooked something without rudders and then who knows?! (Not me. Because we took a detour!)
Love and light
Fair winds
~e.