Overnight to Antigua
It’s 00:55 and I start hearing some rather interesting sea shanties through the speaker—it’s time to get up and leave Marie-Galant! Andy is in the galley prepping coffee while everyone is slowly rising from their bunks. Our night mission to Antigua has started. We leave the anchorage and hoist our mainsail and staysail in a quiet fashion. The first bit of the trip is going to be tacking upwind towards the eastern side of Guadeloupe, so I go back to bed (or try to) as they start tacking. You can hear laughter and feel the tacks getting better and better. I think to myself how cool it is that we are sailing a 65ft ex-racing boat with a bunch of like-minded people who a week ago didn’t know each other, making almost perfect tacks through squalls in the middle of the night.
After reaching the east side of Guadeloupe, we are able to bear away and it’s a sprint from there. FALKEN flew at 10-11 knots, first with the staysail and then with the Yankee and staysail on a close reach all the way to Antigua. She was loving it and so were the crew, feeling her speed on the helm. We directed FALKEN’s bow towards English Harbour, where Nelson hid his fleet of boats back in the day, as Andy explains to us. It was a fabulous entrance to the bay under sail, dropping sails as we turned the corner. After a little tour of the bay, we decided to head to Falmouth Harbour and ended the night enjoying some Caribbean Piri-Piri Chicken ashore at Flatties.
It is now, when I look back, that I realize how proud I am of what we do, what we bring to people who join us, and all they bring to us. It has been a blast! // Alex
laline96@gmail.com
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Quadruple digits!
We are still headed north away from Hawaii, though today we have started to veer ever so slightly east. Speaking of miles, we hit quadruple digits today and are currently 1051 nms into our journey to Alaska. The sea state continues to calm down, and the famous North Pacific high is just out of our reach. The next few days will be a delicate dance of riding the outskirts of the high while avoiding the pesky low pressure systems that are dancing nearby. In his very wise words, we need to get north but not too far north, stay south but not too far south, continue heading east but not too far east, and avoid going west but also stay west.
The basics
Nordic Falken and her crew have been in a steady course of NNW since the departure of Hawaii. But! The good thing of all of this is that the promised land on which the high pressure lies has been getting closer and closer, meaning in a couple of days we're gonna see the wind slowly veer all the way to the South, which finally should see us easing the sails and remembering the basics of human nature all over again. The crew have been amazing and we've had everyone come around to push through fatigue, seasickness and soaking wet clothes. On another note we left the tropics a while ago and we can really feel the shift of temperature, long gone are the shorts and foulies have been the norm. Not much more apart from this, my intolerance to upwind sailing still pretty much alive but doing it with a bunch of such amazing human beings makes it worth it worthwhile.
Pacific pace
After some initial adversity, we untied our lines and left the beautiful island of O'ahu behind as we set sail north on an adventure of a lifetime. And that is exactly what we are - a family of strangers brought together by a passion for sailing and a love for the sea. The passage, while at its infancy, has delivered. The wind and seas, stars and sails all set the stage for a fantastic journey. We will see you on the other side with many stories to tell.