Sailing
In my usual world of racing, if we see a wind shift up ahead we might wait 2 minutes before it reaches us. On this passage, we have sailed upwind for seven days and 1,200 nautical miles to find our wind shift. Our reward is to finally point towards the Canary Islands. Still sailing upwind though!
Today, seven days into our trip, my seasickness is finally gone and the memory of it is fading too. The first 2–3 days my body and mind were fighting it out and I could do nothing other than lie down, throw up, or curse the person who signed me up for 21 days of this. Today I’m happy I’m here!
Morale is high aboard Adrienne! Today we deep-cleaned the whole boat. Everybody is sleeping well, we sail well, and we eat well. Thanks to our meteorologist/skipper, we even understand how the weather works and why we were unable to get above the Azores High for those nice downwind angles.
I look forward to the remaining 14 days of total immersion in nature. All the day-to-day stressors of work, the internet, and just the general state of world affairs can’t reach me here. I still really miss home though!
// Knut, Adrienne II Crew
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First squall of the trip!
"We're gonna get our ass whooped" — not the sunrise greeting anyone had in mind, but Jim called it. The oldest and sharpest hand on board steered them straight through the squall, soaked to the bone and loving every minute of it. He's got a message for his wife, and it turns out she was right about the water.
Sextants, Polynesian Wayfinding, Captain Cook, and Tupaia, Oh My!
Somewhere north of Tahiti and south of Hawaii, aboard a 65-foot rocket of a sailboat loaded with GPS and Starlink, we pulled out a sextant. Not as a novelty—as a navigation tool. Because it turns out the 2,500-mile passage from Tahiti to Hawaii is less a ocean crossing and more a living museum of how humans have always answered the same stubborn question: where am I, and how do I get home? Captain Cook had his chronometers and math; his Polynesian crewmate Tupaia had the stars, the swells, and a map of the Central Pacific stored entirely in his head—and somehow, they were asking the exact same thing.
Star gazing and celebrating
Birthdays at sea hit differently—no cake, no candles, just brownies from a rolling galley and the Milky Way as a backdrop. It's day three aboard, and the skipper's birthday is just one of three to celebrate before landfall. Meanwhile, six crew members sat in silence last night, not from exhaustion or tension, but because the Southern Cross was doing something worth watching.