00:56 UTC | 19°39.10’N 109°09.72’W
Sailing
Another perfect sunrise sipping coffee and swapping stories. It turns out that finding cockroaches on your boat is not the worst place to find them. As a young surf shop employee, Robert once found a cockroach duct taped to his back as by one of his coworkers. The most crucial and harrowing aspect of such a horrible prank is he could feel the little bugger squirming around under the tape. Thinking quickly while failing to reach the tape with his hands, Robert jumped to his back to squish the roach and end the horrible prank. Swapping stories is my favorite part of long passages.
The only thing that could top the gut wrenching laughter of the crew while Robert told his tale was after 1 day 23 hours and 5 minutes Christine finally broke Mary down and the kite went up! We were only able to fly it for the afternoon and it was great to see the crew taking turns at the helm whether they were on watch or not.
The yankee is back out and we are ready for a beautiful sunset and perfect sailing through the night.
Cheers,
Jake
View more passage logs
The Rhythm of Boat Life
On land, your biggest daily challenge is finding a routine. On a boat in the middle of the Pacific, routine is a survival strategy. Tilt your world 15 degrees, swap solid ground for a restless, heaving ocean, and suddenly the basics—eating, sleeping, brushing your teeth—become a negotiation with physics. The question isn't whether boat life is hard. It's whether the hard is the point.
An Equator Crossing for the History Books!
By royal decree of the high seas, nine unsuspecting souls aboard NORDIC FALKEN were summoned before Neptune's mischievous emissaries to confess their sins, offer their sacrifices, and drink the blood of the ocean. What followed was equal parts absurd, sacred, and deeply human — pomelo-husk hats, Cheerio bracelets, and all. The equator has been crossed, the pollywogs are gone, and nothing about this crew will ever quite be the same.
*queue Coldplay’s ”Sky Full Of Stars"*
Somewhere in the doldrums, under a sky so thick with stars that the Milky Way looks like cloud cover, the line between sea and space stops being a metaphor. The bioluminescence below mirrors the galaxies above, Venus sets on the horizon like a distant ship, and at 3am it hits you that you're watching sunlight ricochet through an incomprehensible tangle of celestial bodies to land on glassy Pacific water. Then the equator arrives — no painted line, just a countdown, a crew holding their breath, and Neptune waiting to collect his due.