November

We are planning on hoisting anchor and heading for Honolulu / Ko Olina Marina tomorrow (Nov 2, 2003).  The stop at Palmyra has been the highlight of the trip north but schedules dictate the need to move on.  Depending whether the winds are favorable, we expect probably a six or seven day passage up to Hawaii.    According to Matt, we are the 13th yacht to call at Palmyra this year.  One of the reasons so few yachts come to Palmyra is that you need to make a bunch of  "easting" in order to get a comfortable wind angle once you enter the area of the northeast trades.  The east-setting Equatorial Counter Current that is encountered at about the latitude of Palmyra is a help in this matter but you need to undo a lot of going west. We plan on heading almost due east the first day out, even though Hawaii is almost due north.  After making some easting we will turn on a direct course for Ko Olina.

The next morning we got up early and went through the usual protracted process of stowing the dinghy, awning, etc and in general getting ready to go to sea.  We finally got out at 1120 local time, which was perfect from a lighting point of view.  The pass was easily visible with the sun overhead. On the way out we captured some GPS waypoints so that if we should ever return, the entrance will be much easier than the first time.  About an hour after we left the pass, the plane from Honolulu arrived and made a pass over Bravo Charlie.  This flight was apparently carrying some prospective donors as well as executives from the Nature Conservancy so everyone had been busy the past week getting things ready on the island.  We found out that it costs about $25,000 for the round-trip charter.   The plane, a twin turboprop Gulfstream G-1, and pilots remain on Palmyra while the guests are there.

As is our usual practice we have been checking in with the Pacific Seafarers ham radio net on 14.313 Mhz at 0330Z (0530 HST).   We have been following the position of Sisutl, who left Fanning headed for Honolulu the same day we left for Palmyra.   They have been having a long and nasty time of it, particularly because their autopilot is broken.   They will probably get into Honolulu today.    We were also pleasantly surprised that we got a call from KD5SIT after giving our position report.   This was Emmy on Palmyra saying hello.   The Palmyrians, like many cruisers, apparently entertain themselves by keeping the ham radio on, listening for boats that they know. Those with access to the Internet can follow our progress at www.bitwrangler.com.  The actual page is a few clicks down from that page and can be found in two variants, "old" and "new".  The "old" presentation is superior in my opinion and includes tidbits like the wind, sea state, boat speed etc.

On the morning of the third day the seas flattened out quite a bit and the wind diminished to the mid-teens. We suspect that at least some of the lessening of the seas was due to passing out of the Countercurrent and into the North Equatorial Current, which flows to the west, in the same direction as the wind.  Unfortunately, while making things more comfortable, we started to not be able to make the direct course to Honolulu anymore.

Fortunately (so far), the wind has continued to shift to the east and by mid-evening of the third night we again able to sail the direct course and even crack off the sheets a bit from close-hauled to a close reach.  The last 12 hours have actually been some of the more pleasant upwind trade wind sailing that I have done, with 7.5 kts boat speed and not too much heel or crash-bang-splash.

We shall see what the next 3 days hold as it is possible that the more usual stronger trades and bigger seas will be back.

The 6th and 7th continued as more windy rock and roll waves hit us but we did make good time and kept up our "easting".  There was some "discussion" between the crew and captain about whether there was so much "Need For Speed!"  The crew even got out Steve & Linda Dashews' "Bluewater Handbook" to emphasize that comfort rather than speed has its benefits.

Later on the 7th, however, the wind started to die and we started up the motor.   Unfortunately, it exhibited a behavior of gradually losing RPMs after a few hours.  At first I thought that this was the slipping throttle linkage become worse.  But then Dave suggested checking the fuel filters and to my dismay the vacuum gauge read extremely high, indicating clogging.  We had switched fuel filters in Palmyra but hadn't changed out the dirty one (mistake!) so there was no alternate to immediately switch to.   As it turned out this wouldn't have done any good because the problem appeared to be not the filters themselves, which were quite dirty, but the pickup in the bottom of the fuel tank.  We drained several cups of yucky gunk from the tank sump drain and tried a bunch of things to clear the blockage.  No joy! Then, to top off matters, the genset died too with the same symptoms of bad fuel.

This was becoming serious, as we needed the genset to charge the batteries each day.  All of the furling and autopilot are electric and are ferocious consumers of juice.  And it is very hard to sail Bravo Charlie with manual furling as one has to insert a special tiny winch handle at the mast or head stay and rotate it literally hundreds of times in order to reef or unreef the sail.  Not something that you want to do when you need to reef.  So we instituted an energy saving program, turning off the big energy consumers like the fridge, freezer and radar.   I calculated that this would leave enough power in the batteries until late on the 8th.   If it looked like we were not going to get in by then we would hand steer instead of using the autopilot.  This would preserve the batteries for operating the furlers. (In fact, with the solar panels, they would charge up).