Turning Off the Blog for a Few Days

We're having trouble with our radio communications. Our radio is too slow and we're apparently using too much station time. I'll continue writing these nightly blog posts, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to post them all at once from somewhere in the real world. We need to prioritize weather and position reports (see YOTREPS). Sorry about that. We'll try to set up another account as well.

~ Toast
s/v Don Quixote
April 26, 1845 UTC
N08 46.1 W 123 07.5 6.5 kts 215T NE22-25 NE10'-12' 1013

Shifting Zones

Distance: 116/654

We tried doing laundry yesterday. That was fun. Takes four people with the fifth on helm. I bet there is a more efficient way to do this... there must be since couples manage to get to Hiva Oa with clean laundry. However, on our boat there are five people and coincidentally it took all five of us to manage all the various mechanics of getting the clothes somewhat cleaner. I won't say clean. Until we get past mid-way and/or start getting hit by collectible rain, we're being super conservative with our water. The chance that the water maker would die is very slim, but we go all Murphy and make it none by assuming it would die tomorrow and making sure we have enough water to live until we make landfall. So our clothes are cleaner but due to a lack of multiple rinses with fresh clean water they are not completely and utterly clean.

We also cleaned out the refrigerator. Bonus points for finding two more peppers and an avocado alive and well. Minus points for discovering a chili pepper in a zip lock that had literally dissolved. Ugh. The limons are still in good shape, so we celebrated our efforts with bean and cheese quesidillas with avo and a squeeze of lime. Ambrosia.

We are just about far enough west to change time zones. We're switching the boat to UTC and moving all the watch schedules up an hour. I sucked it up and took the hit for the family during my night watch. They will all sleep in an extra hour. I'll make DrC or Jaime absorb the next one.

Music on watch tonight was a flashback to my high school boyfriend. OMD, Depeche Mode, and Yaz. I wonder now how I ever managed to ride my bike for 3 months without an iPod. I wonder more how anyone manages a crossing like this without 8GB of music and podcasts. I'm sure someone will pipe back with some romantic twaddle about being alone with your thoughts, listening to the sea and wind, yadda yadda. Omigod, I would go mad. I spend a good fraction of my watch dancing, the rest of it expanding my mind with broadcasts from NPR, Slate, TWiT, and the BBC. I also started reading Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. I don't much care for the voice talent for this book which is a bit distracting, but it is hard not to like Stephenson in any format.

I'm starting a list of Things I Never Saw in a Puddle Jump Guide or Blog. I strongly recommend that future jumpers take this list very seriously. The following is my first item:

PPJ#1: BIRDS. What the fo? Boobies and gulls and albatross and every single damn one of them wants to rest for a few hours on the boat. They each poop roughly their body weight per hour. They are immune to the cat, screaming, and sparkly anti-bird measures. What appears to work is smacking them upside the head with a swim noodle or throwing a monkey fist straight at them. Be prepared. Pack a BB gun or a bow and arrow or maybe just a large gauge shot gun. To hell with pirates. Kill the birds!

~ Toast
14 06.40N 118 37.59W (April 23, 12:30 UTC)

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Around Some Corner

Distance: 117/538

Somehow yesterday afternoon I turned a physical/mental corner around which was the promised land of "adjusted to passage." It started with an incredible urge to just go back to sleep and catch another cat nap. I lay down for a few moments, and then I was filled with the very strong urge to do something else. So I got up. Moved around. Sat down. Lay down. Got restless again. Got up.

And that was it.

I cleaned house, drank water, took a wash cloth bath in the cockpit and horrified my children with my naked boobies, and spent the rest of the afternoon on the helm. Dinner was a pleasure to cook and to eat. The low grade headache I'd had since we left del Cabo was gone. I went to bed at what I've established as my bedtime (7pm local) feeling tired but not beaten to a pulp. Getting up for my watch at 1:45am was a struggle, but it didn't feel unduly difficult. No one likes to get up to start their day. It is a typical day that we stumble out of bed, yawn, stretch, scratch and wish we could have just rolled over and slept more. A cup of caffeine and dancing some calesthetics to ABBA hits got me going and all is well.

Three hours later, and I sit at the nav table setting up the position report, and I'm tired, a bit sleepy, a tiny bit of the headache creeps back. That, frankly, is the price I feel is going to inevitably be paid every morning for taking the 2-5 shift. Someone has to suffer. I'm the martyr on this boat.

The shift watch is not an accident nor is it persecution. DrC is incapable of staying awake past 11pm. My working theory is that he used up all his capacity for being alert in the middle of the night during a grueling rotation at Harbor View hospital during his residency. This hospital had a notorious task master in charge that sent all the residents into absolute fits. Our own roommate quit medicine during his rotation through Harbor View, and there were rumors that in prior years more than one had tried to commit suicide. The guy was insane. DrC regularly worked 36 hours shifts. Now, he starts to drop off at 10:30 and there is no amount of coffee and no volume of Led Zep that can possibly stop his slide into oblivion. So DrC gets the 8-11 shift.

Jaime is a teenager. Her natural state is to stay up until 2am and then drop into a coma until 11am. Actually, she'd sleep until 2pm, but I won't let her. So Jaime has 11-2.

We do not ask Mera (12) and Aeron (10) to take full 3 hour watches. That way lies madness. Mera takes two hours and handles them increasingly well from 5-7. Aeron comes on for an hour after Mera. During their watches, DrC and I are awake but doing other things. Aeron in particular is not really very confident at the helm and requires a lot of hand holding during her watch.

And there you have it. 2-5 required someone who didn't fall asleep and wasn't under 13. By default, I was "volunteered." It's okay. Ask me two days ago and I would have said this is hell, but I'm finally getting a bit of a rhythm with a short nap after the night watch and a long sleep after dinner. It'll work, I think. What's more, it doesn't fight my biorhythm either since prior to this trip, I was frequently waking at 2am anyway from either panic or back pain. At least this way, I have something constructive to do.

Precisely NOTHING interesting happened yesterday. This morning, I almost took a spear fishing gun to a seagull that decided to use our boat as a rest stop. I don't mind them resting their wings, but they think we are a full service rest stop complete with a food court and a restroom. Get back to me if you have seagull recipes. I'm ready for action.

~ Toast (11:30 UTC April 22)
15 14.38N 116 48.66W

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Where is the Promised Energy?

Distance: 124/421

So Day 4 has come and gone, and we're still tired and lethargic. So much for getting used to this. I have a strong feeling we are going to arrive in the Marquesas with a filthy boat, filthy clothes, and having spent the final two weeks eating beans straight from the can. I don't feel like cooking, washing, writing, reading, eating, having sex, speaking, talking, chewing gum, or walking. What I really enjoy doing is sleeping, sitting on the helm, and then sleeping some more. These two activities are punctuated by a sporadic desire to sit in the cockpit and stare at the horizon for an hour without moving my head.

I stretch periodically.

This must be what life is like as a cat. Except, they probably don't have the dull ache at the back of the head and behind the eyeballs.

Our most exciting moment in the past 24 hours was gybbing around yet another parked tanker. Holy frickin' god you know the economy is bad when you can sail out into the middle of the Pacific and randomly run into two tankers simply parked in the middle of nowhere. Not moving. Not responding to the radio. Not doing anything. They just sit there like enormous poorly lit steel islands. The sheer enormity of the odds against a random puddle jumper seeing one of these is mind boggling. The fact that I personally have nearly run into two of them during my 2AM to 5AM night watches gives me the heebie jeebies.

We ate the last of the pineapple and colored peppers yesterday. Had to throw away two cucumbers. I made a large batch of tomato vegetable soup with some of the end of line veg which tasted delicious despite its origins. We're just about out of store-bought bread. Really, that stuff is nasty. It lasts almost forever in the refrigerator, and I do not say that in tones of admiration. Within a day or so, I'm going to have to get serious about being a Real Cook, baking bread, getting my yogurt culture bouncing, and pulling out the frozen meats for stews and bean soups. What seemed logical and tasty a month ago now appears in an insurmountably active heap of effort. You can not imagine how difficult it is to soak beans in water.

Speaking of the cat, our most amusing moment of the day was watching Dulcinea attempt to return to one of her favorite perches on the locker we've created under the bimini. A combination of raising the locker to make it smaller and the increased girth of the cat resulted in the perfect lolcat moment with Dulci firmly stuck in the locker, her back legs, tail and soft white underbelly squished out and hanging helplessly. There was the sound of her scramble to dig her claws into something to get purchase. With an almost audible >pop< the rest of her disappeared. There was then an indignant silence from the locker as the family laughed hysterically. After a suitable interval when it presumably was made clear to us that she had enjoyed the pleasures of the locker sufficiently and didn't need to leave because she simply Does Not Fit, the first half of Dulci reemerged. The rest of her remained firmly wedged in the locker whilst she tugged and tugged on her hindquarters. Once again, her aft eventually burst out and threw the entire kitty into the helm in a big, fluffly, spitting mad ball.

Of such moments our days are made full.

~ Toast (April 21, 13:00 UTC)
16 37.86N 115 27.18W