pre-departure
The new crew of eight joined myself, first mate Manot, and apprentice Athena aboard Falken yesterday at 1300 to sail from Ponta Delgada, Azores to Galway, Ireland. After a friendly introduction to the staff, the boat, and the forthcoming passage, we dove straight into the domestic briefs followed by the essential safety briefs: fire, flooding, abandoning ship, gas safety, dismasting, and the on-deck orientation.
After a delicious meal at a local restaurant and an early night, we commenced the safety brief this morning with winch safety, lifejackets, and a Man Over Board (MOB) drill. Lunch gave everyone a chance to recharge and digest all the information thrown at them over the past 24 hours.
This afternoon we discussed the weather forecast, and the crew started working on our passage plan and pilotages out of Ponta Delgada and into Galway, with a potential stop in the Aran Islands. The weather forecast shows fresh northerly winds on Monday, so we might delay our departure until Tuesday to have a slightly easier start to the trip.
Everyone is excited to leave and looking forward to the 1200nm passage. Fair winds and a following sea.
- Chris
ChrisKobusch
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.