sunrise
Yesterday we slipped our lines from St. Francis Yacht Club—thank you Jason for hosting us—and we squeezed past the sandbar at the entrance, hoisted our main, and slowly glided with the tide under the Golden Gate Bridge. What a view! I love when our adventures take us to such iconic places and we get to experience these landscapes to the fullest.
After the thrill of the bridge, we unfurled our headsail and started sailing. First, we had to get through the “potato patches,” as the locals call it—an area where shallow water mixes with big offshore swells and generates some steep waves. After clearing it, we had lunch and enjoyed the views as Falken sailed at 8 knots in 9 knots of wind. The wind lasted until the afternoon and then completely left us, forcing us to turn the engine on to make some more ground south.
We then spent the night furling and unfurling the Yankee as the wind filled and dropped, making the most of it. As I’m typing this, the fog has made an appearance. We’re drifting at 2 knots, trying to squeeze anything out of the little breeze we have, and we’re enjoying some coffee. We’ve just had a stunning sunrise in a very still ocean, and there’s a great vibe onboard.
Lots of love,
Alex | FALKEN Skipper
laline96@gmail.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.