Sailing
Remember sleepaway camp when you were a kid? Bunk beds and cabin mates, sing-alongs and traditions, color wars and duties, friendships formed and cemented in hours. Memories and experiences that last a lifetime. In many ways, Falken is a grown-up floating sleepaway camp.
My bunkmate is also my watch mate, and together we share countless hours talking, sailing, not talking, giggling, doing dishes, and restlessly napping above and below one another. I share my cabin with three other people, our bunks decorated with drying towels, dirty clothes, dangling shoes, and our little nests of comfort.
All eight of us together are a crew, led by our three fearless and eternally joyful camp counselors (not to be taken lightly—their sailing, cooking, and leadership skills are unmatched!). We eat together. We share glums and glows. Dolphin and whale sightings are sounded. Cookies, croissants, and watermelon magically appear. Sing-alongs spontaneously erupt. Tales and stories are shared. Laughter abounds. And together, we make this floating camp move through the water to a common destination.
We are all overtired and definitely over-dirty. But no one cares.
The past two mornings I have found myself lying in bed, looking through the few downloaded pictures (no internet) of my family on my phone and feeling homesick. I haven’t felt this feeling since I was a kid myself, away from family and home and all that was known and safe. I miss them so much. I never knew I could miss them this much. Yet at the same time, I want to hold on to this magical floating world. There must be a word for that feeling, but I am too tired to pull it from my memory. For now, I will just call it joy.
— Marella
View more passage logs
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.