Day 9 At-Sea
13º 10’ N, 052º 52’ W
2308 Ship’s Time
13º 10’ N, 052º 52’ W
Steering 285º at 8-9 knots
We’ve slowed down a touch today with some lighter winds, but are still above our 200 miles per day threshold over the past 24 hours. You get spoiled when you top out at 220+!
I’m tired as I write this. It’s the tail end of my 2000-0000 watch. I’ll get 4 hours off, then stand the sunrise watch from 0400-0800 before getting a longer 6-hour break from 0800-1400. We run a staggered watch schedule on FALKEN whereby myself or Manot is awake, but staggered so that we get to overlap with each of the crew watches and thereby get to sail with everyone on the boat. The Port watch is on right now, standing their 2200-0200 stint. The waxing moon has provided the perfect runway by which to steer—keep the moonlight on the horizon just to starboard and the boat is bang on course.
We’ve crossed the 400-miles-to-go barrier. While it’s still a long way off, talk has begun of landfall and arrival procedures. I’ve been quick to quell it to keep people in the moment, but by dinnertime tomorrow night it’ll be inevitable. The ‘philosophical middle stage’ of this long voyage will end and the ‘landfall’ stage will begin. The crew, myself included, will shift our focus from the present to the future. We’ll look at the charts and plan our pilotage on arrival to Barbados (necessary); we’ll talk about the first food ashore we’re going to eat and how good a cold drink is going to taste (superfluous but fun!).
But that’s for tomorrow. Tonight, we’re still in the present tense, still gazing at the same stars that we’ve been sailing to for over a week now, still discussing the finer points of life at sea and still hot and sweaty from the afternoon heat. I’m topping up the water tanks tonight with a long run on the watermaker in anticipation of our last showers at sea tomorrow afternoon.
// Andy
andy@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.