back to ACTION!
It is a new year and a new season is about to start on FALKEN! I came down to Lagos with the family before the new year to have a quick vacation before the season started. We have enjoyed playing on the beaches, exploring the side streets of Lagos, shopping at the farmers market on Saturday, and getting a few small projects done on FALKEN in between. Lagos has been a frequent stop, and I first came here back in 2012 when Andy and I sailed a Saga 43, KINSHIP, with ARC Europe. We also sailed in here with ISBJORN after our summer up in Svalbard, and both FALKEN and ICEBEAR have been here multiple times.
Emily, who is the skipper for this leg, arrived late on the 1st, and since then we switched into work mode and are prepping FALKEN for her next passage. I thought I was smart to get the major provisioning done before Emily arrived, but didn't realize until I stepped into Pingo Doce (the supermarket closest to the marina) that it was New Year's Eve and the store was packed. Anyhow, lots of good food is now added to FALKEN for the next leg.
Crew will arrive today at 1 pm. We have been monitoring the weather and it looks like we'll sit out some weather on Sunday and depart after that. We are kicking off the 2025 season with an all-female crew, eager to jump onboard and make our way towards Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Bethany and Jeana came down the docks yesterday to check out FALKEN and I am sure the rest of the crew have been spying on us from the shore.
Our aim is to send in daily blogs to the website, so check back to hear about our adventures as we head south!
HOLD FAST!
Mia
mia@59-north.com
View more passage logs
”For some things, we will never be ready.” - Moana 2
After 852 miles of open ocean sailing, the crew of Falken dropped anchor in Moorea's Cook's Bay—not with a quiet glide in, but surfing down waves in a squall, breaking speed records and cheering each other on through the rain. What started as a plan to "just dip a toe" into offshore sailing turned into something harder to explain: the worse the conditions got, the more alive everyone felt. Turns out the question was never whether the crew was ready—it was whether they even needed to be.
Kauehi conundrum
Kauehi atoll was always on the itinerary—until the forecast made it a gamble not worth taking. Squalls, bommies, a tidal pass, and no clean escape route: sometimes the hardest call in sailing is the one that keeps you out of a place, not in it. The Tuamotus will have to wait.
Hove-to!
Falken is too fast—a problem most sailors would kill for, yet here we are, tacking back and forth across the Pacific just to kill time. A rogue low pressure system south of Tahiti has stolen the trades and scrambled our timing for the tidal window into Kauehi's pass, leaving us hove-to 45 miles short of our target in the Tuamotus. Salt licorice, dream sandwich debates, and a philosophical question about mermaid reproduction are helping pass the night.