Sailing
Lloyd wished it to be known that this blog was written before the Super Bowl.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday. I had booked this adventure long before I found out my beloved Seattle Seahawks would be any good, let alone playing in the game. Such is life, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I believe I have convinced most of our crew to join me in my rooting interest, while I receive sporadic updates via satellite.
Enough of all that.
I want to talk today about community. We get to know the crew we stand watches with quite well. One of the Falken Crew, Jake (who is wise well beyond his 27 years), put a thought into my head. Talking about his adventures exploring our country via a camper van, he said he had discovered something. All of his experiences meant just a bit less because he was solo; he was not sharing them with others.
An experience is greater when it is a shared experience.
On this leg on Falken, Jake and Delaney are the only two who had previously met, having worked together on the schooner Woodwind. The other nine of us had never met. We are a group who has come together for a common adventure, working towards common goals. Through all of the highs and lows of this trip, we have formed bonds and friendships. This sense of community has amplified what is already a wondrous adventure — an experience made richer because it is a shared experience.
This aspect has been a pleasant surprise.
// Lloyd
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.