Thai curry and whales!
17.25 LOCAL TIME | 03º 19’S 092º 05’W
SAILING
Happy Birthday, Quinn! It’s hard to believe we have only been underway for just over 24 hours. The day has been filled with sailing, and despite being down to 3 knots of boat speed at times, we have managed to continue sailing due to the flat sea! Most of the day, though, we have had wind between 6–10 knots and had a great sail with both the yankee and the staysail up! It is hot, but thanks to the breeze and the shade that the main is creating, we have managed to stay sane.
Zoey is having a shrimp Thai curry on the stove; I can imagine she is ready for some cool breeze after an hour in the galley :) We are also having a ‘surprise’ chocolate cake for Quinn to celebrate his birthday after dinner. I’m not sure how much of a surprise it will be, though, as it’s hard to cover the smell from the oven when it’s being baked. One little mishap we discovered from Galapagos was that we managed to get ‘wax paper’ instead of parchment paper—not ideal for making the cake, oops! Who uses wax paper? Never understood that concept. Lost in translation…
Vince and Phoebe are on watch, with Vince currently at the helm. Jim just got out of his bunk after a nice little nap, probably waking up to the smell of Zoey’s Thai curry! First full day on FALKEN, and it feels like we have been here a week already. We had a pod of pilot whales visit us earlier today, then a pod of dolphins while I was sound asleep a few hours ago. Last night, we had a few birds circling around the boat, making a cracking sound that, after many tries, we decided was impossible to imitate :)
Cheers,
Mia Karlsson
View more passage logs
Ladies who reef
The trade winds have been kind, rolling the boat toward Hawaii in a steady, hypnotic rhythm—until last night, when a squall hit without warning and the wind jumped to 28 knots, slamming everything sideways. With rain driving down and the boat lurching underfoot, the crew had minutes to wrestle two reefs into the mainsail and get things back under control. What followed was a masterclass in wet, unglamorous, deeply satisfying teamwork—with less than 250 miles left to go.
Yankee Doodle Died at Sea, Riding on a FALKEN
A thin, foot-long tear in the yankee sail—50,000 miles of ocean behind it—and suddenly the final stretch to Hawaii just got a lot more interesting. The crew of FALKEN had been running a tight ship through the trades, reefing in squalls like clockwork, when the last dance finally caught up with them. How a skipper handles the moment everything goes sideways says everything about the voyage itself.
A Gen Z Perspective
At 31, the crew thought they were reasonably fluent in the English language—then they met Kip. Today, the crew's self-appointed Gen Z correspondent takes over the log from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, delivering dispatches on Milky Way night sails, focaccia-induced visions, and the singular mission of getting eleven people's "badonkadonks" to Hawaii. Consider this your glossary.