Day 10 – Halfway! – 10-31-24
Today we achieved two major milestones, 10 days at sea, and over 1,600 miles sailed, so halfway home. It is crazy that we have sailed this far, but even MORE CRAZY that we still have 1,600 miles to go! You get a whole new appreciation for the size, magnitude and magnificence of our ocean when you sail on top of it at 8.5 miles an hour instead of flying over it at 30,000 feet and 600 miles per hour!
We often reflect on the mariners that have gone long before us in much less sophisticated vessels. It was not long ago when sailing ships were lucky to go 4 knots instead of the 7 or 8 we do. And they did not have good charts or any real means of knowing reliably where they were. Our boat would be a technological wonder to them. We get comprehensive weather updates twice a day that include wind speed and direction, current speed and direction and rain forecasts, for up to 10 days in advance. We have navigational equipment that can tell us exactly where we are on detailed charts within inches. Our autopilot can steer the exact course we tell it to, optimizing our course for the forecasted winds and currents. We make more fresh water than we can drink in a day with our desalination system, and our solar panels produce the energy to power all this equipment. And if the wind dies, we have a reliable diesel engine that can push us along for days at a time to get through any calms.
With Starlink we have high speed internet access that lets me do these blog posts and video calls with my wife, kids, and grandkids. Geez, we have it EASY! I have total respect for those who went before us with none of these conveniences!
We had yet another great sailing day with 12 to 20 knots of wind from the south pushing us towards home. We covered 187 miles in the last 24 hours, a 7.8 knot average. The sailing conditions were so nice we decided to turn off Otto, the autopilot, and hand steer for most of the afternoon. This gave Luke and Mateo a great opportunity to get the feel for how to steer a boat like this in some fairly windy conditions. They both are truly naturals and did a great job keeping us on course!
We are now 600 miles north of the equator, and normally we would be well into the northeast Tradewinds by this point. Currently there are a couple of low pressure systems just north of us that are literally sucking us towards them. The hurricane season has just ended in the north Pacific. Had we been here a couple of weeks earlier, these lows would have become tropical depressions, a tropical storm or even possibly a hurricane. But this late in the season, the lows are safe and helping us move north, which is very unexpected and very nice! Here is a screen shot of the location of the lows from the NOAA National Hurricane Center. We are located where the red dot is.
We still have not made it all the way through the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Although we had much more settled weather today with steady winds and no squalls, we still have cloudy skies. We won’t be on the other side of the ITCZ until we hit the northeast Tradewinds. So, we are going to continue to ride this south wind till we get at the end of the road, which will be when the northeast trades reach us. That could be tonight, tomorrow or even Saturday. When we do reach the northeast Tradewinds, the sailing will become much more challenging with the wind and waves coming more directly at us instead of form behind us. So the last half of this trip will be much harder that the first half.
It was so nice out we even enjoyed another movie night out in the cockpit. This time we went with a sailors favorite, Captain Ron. We all shared some good laughs while watching a movie about sailing while we were sailing…
