20.06 BOAT TIME | 09º 53.5’ S 129º 22.3 ’ W
Spinnaker Sailing
I’ve had a lot of birthdays at sea, it happens when you work on the water. Today wasn’t just another birthday away from home, I can’t tell you how many times I was serenaded with enthusiastic happy birthdays. Zoe presented me with a cold apple at breakfast! I had a most fashionable pointed striped hat at dinner, and out of the depths of a cupboard a cake was created, after 14 days at sea. A group of people I had never met two weeks ago made me feel very special today.
In more important news we hoisted the spinnaker at first light this morning, and it’s still flying now as the sun sets into the ocean off our bow. The winds are light, and the swell has come down to about a meter. Perfect kite weather. We’re making around 7 knots in 10 knots of wind, nothing wrong with that. Alex held a class in the cockpit, which is still blanketed in lovely afternoon shade, now with a pink tint from the spin. He pulled out a whiteboard and ran through sail trim, from headsail cars and backstay tension to how to de-power in a hurry. The plan is to continue afternoon lessons until our arrival.
Wishing everyone shoreside a beautiful day, from Falken, as she sails into a bright pink sky, under a bright pink spinnaker.
Phoebe G.
View more passage logs
Yankee Doodle Died at Sea, Riding on a FALKEN
A thin, foot-long tear in the yankee sail—50,000 miles of ocean behind it—and suddenly the final stretch to Hawaii just got a lot more interesting. The crew of FALKEN had been running a tight ship through the trades, reefing in squalls like clockwork, when the last dance finally caught up with them. How a skipper handles the moment everything goes sideways says everything about the voyage itself.
A Gen Z Perspective
At 31, the crew thought they were reasonably fluent in the English language—then they met Kip. Today, the crew's self-appointed Gen Z correspondent takes over the log from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, delivering dispatches on Milky Way night sails, focaccia-induced visions, and the singular mission of getting eleven people's "badonkadonks" to Hawaii. Consider this your glossary.
Fuel fears and back in the trades!
Five hundred miles of open Pacific, no wind, and a fuel tank that wasn't going to cover it. Falken's skipper Mary had a problem: the ITCZ had ballooned from a manageable sliver into an 8-degree-wide wall of doldrums, and the arithmetic wasn't pretty. This is the story of how rum, restraint, and some very attentive helming got them out the other side.
