lines slipped
January 6, 2025, 08:35 UTC | Lines Slipped
Departure Day! It's 8:30 in the morning and the crew on FALKEN is doing the final prep before departure. Crew arrived on the 4th to sunny Lagos. We knew some weather was coming in on Sunday, so we put all crew to work straight away (after a cup of tea—when you have Brits onboard, tea breaks are taken very seriously) and hoisted the Yankee. Great teamwork to learn how to work together and operate the winches! After a nice dinner ashore, we were all pretty tired, but as usual, not everyone slept that great the first night—lots of new noises, new people, and some dock lines moving around.
Yesterday we started our briefings on deck and were very thankful to have the Yankee up. The wind increased during the day and the rain started late morning. After the front had gone through, the wind eased off and I went up the rig to do a final rig check before departure. Even a little bit of sunshine came through while I was up there.
After some more chat about the passage and dinner onboard, we all went to bed after what felt like a very long day, even though it was only 8:45 pm when the lights went out. More rain overnight, but we are hoping for a sunny day as we depart Lagos!
/ Mia
mia@59-north.com
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Birds and glows
The sun brought new wind and we were soon putting up the Yankee (jib) and turning off the motor. During the evening tradition of sharing “glums and glows” that follows the crew dinner, our Mate Ryan proclaimed it a “champagne sailing” kind of day. As Alex noted this evening, life goes by so fast that one of the very best things about his line of work is enjoying the passage of time in the slow lane of an ocean passage. But by tomorrow, the green blobs in the weather sailing app indicate we’re going to pick up some significant northwesterly winds and we’ll take them ever further south to the Channel Islands latitude. We’re all super excited for the knots to climb and to see Falken really run.
Golden Day
The Pacific is giving us “the shimmer” - with a still flat sea seven hours out of San Francisco Bay, we’re motoring south along the shipping channel, with an hour to go to what teases now as a stunning sunset against wispy clouds. Throughout this first day of Falken 11 the sails have unfurled and been furled again as skipper Alex tries to fill them a meager breeze indeed. We’ve seen a few whales traveling along the route, and an otter that was sadly just a buoy. It’s the first open ocean sail for many of us and it’s a thrill to anticipate all the new experiences we’ll have.
Seasickness
But maybe, I thought, with some drugs I could stay ahead of it. The first 48 hours I felt horrible. But luckily with 3 health care professionals on board and in a very encouraging environment, my body found its way. Anyway, someone offered me a patch (unavailable in Canada) and someone else gave me some pills for nausea and now I feel much, much better.