At the dude ocean ranch, we gather around the salt-encrusted, red-glowing compass in the aft cockpit for the night watches. We tell stories, many utterly unfit to print. As the distance traveled on the display is now in the 1900s and 2000s, we tell stories from each year we lived. Our spirits are high. If you could hear us, you would hear giggling and roaring laughter all the time.
Yesterday, we were still sailing. It was ocean sailing at its best. Waves roll in as walls of water behind the helm. They lift the boat meters above the landscape, giving us a good view of the water hills and valleys around us—a landscape that is unique and to be replaced with another unique landscape within a few counts. The horizon is wavy. Caravans of jagged wave shapes careen to faraway beaches.
As a wave travels under us, the boat pitches down and then up as we surf down the wave. Our speed picks up, sometimes up to 14 or 15 knots. We land softly at the bottom of the wave in a pool of white water. Steering is a dream and feels like dancing, swinging between gently providing direction and feeling where the boat wants to go. Too little direction and the boat would round up; too much and we are clumsily slaloming.
Today we are motoring through the Azore highs back to the trade winds that blow around the Canaries. We are on autopilot. It takes fewer people to stand watch, so some of us are catching up on sleep. Normally, the watch system won’t give you more than 5.5 hours of consecutive sleep. Now, with some planning, you can get close to a full night’s rest. I snoozed and lost. This morning, two playful minke whales joined us when some of us were still asleep. Around noon, two Bermuda longtail birds took a look or two at us. These oceanic birds only come to land to nest. They are an endangered species with 3,000–4,000 left.
Other than you might expect from 10 guys on a ship, we keep the ship shipshape. This afternoon we had another spontaneous deep clean. There is a bowl of rising dough on the galley counter for hamburger buns. In the evening we celebrate fredagsmys (Swedish expression for a cozy Friday night) with hamburgers and fries. This is getting repetitive but needs to be said: the dinner is amazing again.
Most of us have booked accommodation on land now that we know better when we will arrive at Gran Canaria. We expect to make landfall coming Wednesday or Thursday. Skipper and old salt Erik reminds us that the trip will be over sooner than we think and tells us to try and take as much in as possible. Just five more days on the bouncy castle we call the Atlantic.
Allard Schipper, Adrienne Crew
crew@59-north.com
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”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.