settling in
Good morning! It’s 10 am here. Jillian is making me a cup of coffee and Paolo is at the helm. Jeanette is waiting for her turn at the helm and Kevin is having some breakfast. We are now 24 hours into the passage—a long way to go, but we have already covered 173 nm since we left Las Palmas.
The team is split into two watches. We have the A team on at the moment, and the B team is hard asleep in their bunks. I am sure as time goes on, there will be a more creative name assigned to their teams!
All is good onboard. We left the marina just after 10 am yesterday—a busy morning getting the final preps done onboard, and we topped up our diesel tanks on the way out. We zig-zagged past some big tankers anchored just outside, waiting for their turn to get into the harbor. The breeze filled in nicely and we had a lovely sail down the Canary coast. Once we cleared land, the pole went up and we have sailed wing on wing all night long, wind between 10-15 knots, with occasional gusts up towards 20.
We all gathered together in the cockpit at 6 pm (at watch change) for dinner and everyone had a big bowl—that’s a good sign on Day 1! Last night we only had one bucket out, but the fishes were disappointed as the bucket was never used.
We are now settled in nicely onboard, but it usually takes a couple of days until everyone has caught up on their sleep and is fully immersed in the watch schedule of being awake a few hours at night and napping during the day.
That’s it for now. If you read the blog, we would love to hear some comments from you who are ashore in the comment section below—our shore team will send them over to us!
From Mia & the FALKEN team
mia@59-north.com
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.