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
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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.