Part One
We’ve just passed the south west tip of Nuku Hiva. It’s about 5 miles to the anchorage. The battle plan for pre arrival chores has been instigated. Showers, shave, hair ziz for Dave, wash the cockpit with fresh water, do the washing up, etc etc. Generally making Grace and ourselves look as bright and shiny as we can after many days at sea.

There will be customs, borders and immigration officials so looking bright and shiny sets the right tone in our heads.

The land is spectacular. Wild rock shapes, crazy looking ridges, every inch covered in green. Birds pop over to have a looksy before heading off. The wind is ‘up the chuff’ for this 4 mile leg along the south of the island. It’s relatively slow. But an extra 30 mins or so in the scheme of a passage of this length is neither here nor there.

Part Two…. some time later
Dun, Dun, Dun…..we’re in. About 3 months later than planned due to a respiratory disease, but we’re safely here. We’re anchored in Taiohea Bay on Nuku Hiva. 29 days and 14 hours to be precise was our time at sea from Pedro Gonzales in the las perlas islands just south of Panama City.

I can’t say the passage has all been a bed of roses. Often the things I (and I’m guessing others too) appreciate and value are things that have been worked for. Let’s face it, we’re in French Polynesia!

But that is forgotten now. We’re having beer and a picnic lunch. Friends came out in the dinghy with Hinano Tahiti Beer.

I will be asleep very soon.

Not the most inspiring of titles but I thought I’d write something a bit more practical to share a modicum of daily life on Grace.

An ocean passage for us is primarily about keeping the boat moving. It’s a constant balance between speed, comfort and looking after the stresses and strains on the boat and ourselves. It may be possible to go quicker but if it makes life unduly uncomfortable because you’re living at a funky angle all the time, it’s not much fun.

Keeping a constant eye on the strength and direction of the wind dictates how much, or what sails we have up. During the day we generally feel more comfortable with more sail up. While at night – and it does get pretty dark out here – putting some sail away reduces speed but can make for a much better night’s sleep

We constantly keep an eye on how much power we’re using. Doing your batteries over is not a good idea. We run instruments to tell us stuff like wind speed and our course over the ground. We’ve kept the chart plotter on more than we anticipated and at night we often run the radar with alarms set to inform us if there’s anything out there. Our experience so far has been not much! One yacht which came past us, and three large container ships. One we saw on the horizon. The other two we didn’t even see but they showed up on the chart plotter. The radar also shows up rain showers which is pretty handy.

Our fridge / freezer uses constant power. Charging iPads, the camera, the Big Torch, cabin lights, et al also eat amps. The solar panels replenish some power during the day, but we are in a routine of running the generator in the morning for a short time to top up the batteries. With the added benefit of water-making.

Food wise, we normally sort ourselves out at breakfast time as we’re on different schedules depending on night watches. Lunch and dinner we eat together. Dinner is normally around 7.30pm with the night watch starting at 9pm. The watch is around 3 hours but not set in stone; the ‘sailor’ wakes the ‘sleeper’ when they are ready to swap over. This gives flexibility – no alarms – without disturbing sleep too much. Although being gently shaken awake at 3am from a deep deep sleep is not always the most pleasant.

Onto food, particularly freshies. Almost 4 weeks in, we have plentiful onions and potatoes from the sack of each in Panama. Every five or six days, we empty the sacks, check their condition & get rid of rotters. We also have plenty of green apples, having wrapped these individually in paper before leaving and they’ve lasted really well. There’s a handful of satsumas left, garlic, ginger, some tomatoes, 2 big squash, around 10 limes and about 1.5 trusty cabbages still going strong.

I cooked and froze about 8 meals before we set off so if we had crappy weather or neither of us felt like cooking, there were good meals to go. I think we’ve used about 5 of these. At the start of the passage, you’re often easing into the situation and cooking is not always high on the agenda of things you fancy doing.

During the day, there’s no watch pattern. We just go with the flow, with someone keeping an eye on things in the cockpit. Daily life needs servicing. Cooking, showering, keeping the boat clean, checking things over visually for signs of stuff going wrong. Fishing (helps if you don’t drop your primary favourite rod into the sea), reading, writing, napping, mending things, card school. Doesn’t sound like much but the day gets filled pretty easily.

It’s a simple existence. We do have the sat phone which gives us basic email and the ability to download weather / current predictions. We both love having this as it means we can stay in touch with folks.`This may sound a bit wired, but we don’t really feel disconnected even if physically we are!

Right, that’s enough. Time to check the course and make a note in the log book of our position. Oh, and finally we don’t actually steer the boat ourselves. We have machines to do that for us.

Mary, Mungo and Midge crossed the Equator with us. Not sure where numbers 4 and 5 went but we are down to 3 resident Boobies. I surmised that numbers 4 and 5 woke up one morning and thought, this doesn’t feel like home anymore, and headed back east, following similar words of the 1939 classic staring Dorothy and Toto.

The three M’s show no signs of jumping ship. We chase them off. They come back. They fish in the morning and again in the evening, spending the rest of the day, squabbling, preening and dozing. Not unlike Dave and I. Not strictly true….preening has dropped down our list of essentials. 😀

We have two big bits of boats news.

Numero Uno. We crossed the EQUATOR. The display on the chart plotter swapped from N to S indicating we’re officially in the Southern Hemisphere. I expected to see Neptune on a sleigh of dolphins, surrounded by preening mermaids. He may have been there and I was just looking the wrong way. Still, it was fun as we offered a snifter of the hard stuff to honour his presence. Then had one ourselves. Photographic evidence exists although all you can actually see in my photo is Big Hair and little else.

Our second bit of news is that we are into the last 1000 miles. 977 to go according to the machine. Maybe a week at sea, although the last few days have been slow going after the heady 200 mile days of a week or so ago. We’re supposed to have wind and current all the way now so fingers, flippers and hair crossed for this.

Supplies are holding out well although the fishing has been really disappointing. On our Atlantic crossing we caught something pretty much every-time we put a line in. Not so in the Pacific. The tuna was nice but it was also several days ago. My weekly onion sort has just been completed. All pretty good. And of course you want to know about cabbage. Still two full ones. Dave did say to me one evening, we seem to have cabbage every time you cook. He’s a lucky boy.

Today is day 18 and it’s the longest we’ve ever been at sea. Although we are not alone, having 5 non paying passengers who have taken up residence on our bow sprit. Their hygiene and toileting habits are fairly dire and they can’t stand a night watch so they are not the most welcome of guests, our freeloading red footed boobies! They are bizarre looking birds, so if you don’t know what one looks like, google it and you too can join in the experience of smiling at these crazy looking creatures.

We’re at the point where days are melting into one another. The catering department stands out though. We had fish and chips last night. Posh fish and chips no less…..fresh yellowfin tuna marinated in lime juice with sautéed potatoes and a side order of top notch cabbage, onion, garlic and ginger. Followed by tinned peaches. We are at sea and a can now and then is obligatory and I really like tinned peaches. Mixed fruit is disappointing and pineapple should only be used to make cakes. Things like figs are other worldly and prunes pass muster but only at breakfast time.

Fishing in the Pacific has been less successful than in the Atlantic. We’ve lost 3 lures….maybe the fish are just bigger here, and we have no more spare line. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Resources are finite on Grace. Good job we’re stocked up on loo roll and tinned peaches.

Our purple patch of hyper galactic speed is now behind us as currents have eased. Daily runs of 190, 194, 174, 178, 209, 195 have been followed by a more subdued 135 today. It’s weird to think we’ve been on the constant move for so many days now. Sometimes I forget this.

Tactics wise, we are still above the equator, but starting to curve down in a south westerly direction. There’s a current roundabout ahead. No it’s not a new offering at Greggs the bakers. It could be the British version of a Danish pastry though. Grace needs to position herself to ride the south going anti-clockwise current then hop out to the right and join the current down to the Marquesas.

I shall stick my head briefly above the parapet here. It may prove a foolish move. Time will determine. I’m surmising an arrival between 15th and 17th July. Dave has just gone for 40 winks and he departed pointing at the Speed Over Ground instrument saying, “don’t let that drop below 5”. So far I’m being successful doing nothing more than delivering a brief glance every so often. Sailing through telepathy.

Scores on the doors if you’re interested.
Current position 01 31.13N. 116 16.33W
Speed over ground 5.8 knots
Distance to go. As always it’ll be more than this, 1557, meaning we’ve done 2283.

Almost two weeks in and that wave of emotion has had peaks and troughs along the way. Here’s some high level stuff to paint the picture. I like a bullet point.

• It’s about 4000 miles -ish to Nuku Hiva from Panama
• I say ish because you never travel in a straight line in a sail boat, there’s always some too-ing and fro-ing to be done
• It took us 9 days to get to the north western end of the Galápagos Islands. The first 36 hours was motoring with diddly squat wind
• We then had plenty of wind, almost exclusively from where we wanted to go. Plus counter currents. This necessitated an etch-a-sketch track as we tacked back and forth to make slow slow uncomfortable progress
• We had unpleasant, nay scary, thunderstorms with lightening forks cracking around the boat. The rain was a true deluge and our visibility was diminished massively. We were both hanging out, sat on the cabin floor in our soaked waterproofs at one point
• THEN we picked up a strong west going current and our speed over the ground topped 10.2 knots. Hurrah!
• Yesterday our noon to noon distance made good was 190 miles. Best ever by some margin. Will we hit the magical 200 mark today?
• Our top speed hit 10.2 knots at one point last night. Blimy O’Reilly
• We are fit and well and already talking about getting in and walking about. Lots of walking about
• Distance to go is 2,418 miles….in a straight line so not halfway yet
• Other boats seen since we left the shipping lanes around Panama. 1 cargo vessel.
• Fish caught. One enormous, humongous, swordfish. It snapped our line. There’s no way we’d have landed this thing onto Grace
• Lots of dead squid on the deck each morning. I like squid but I don’t fancy cooking these guys up
• Plenty of dolphins….small ones….birds too
• It’s been chilly at night. Unexpected. We dug out thermals for our night watches.
• And finally, still have 4 cabbages left.

So that’s a little summary of what’s been our focus for the last couple of weeks. At some point we need to cross the doldrums and the equator to get further south. But for the time being, we’re heading west with good wind and current, eating miles, drinking tea, staying sane. We hope!

For the purposes of this story I’ll call him Simon. He didn’t really have much respect for ‘da management’. He was a bright capable guy, who had a vociferous opinion on most things and could – I believe – have been difficult to manage at times. He also had a wildly subversive sense of humour. Put these character traits together and you have a perfect storm.

His 6 monthly ‘chat’ about how things were going at work was coming up. Simon wasn’t the happiest of bunnies and he was keen to get his point across.

That morning he came down to breakfast (a whole gang of us worked at an outdoor residential centre….this is back in the day). He was proudly wearing a millinery hand crafted delight on his head. Crown like but with drooping Deputy Dawg ears. The main material used in the manufacture of this contraption was tin foil.

The conversation went something like this. ‘Morning Simon, nice hat. Is it today you’ve got your performance review?’

“Yes”, he replied with glee, “that’s why I made the hat. It’s my bull shit deflector.” At which point he pulled a string and the deputy dawg ears shot up vertically to demonstrate its purpose. Just brilliant and so Simon. We all just fell about and what was even better, he wore the hat to his performance review meeting. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall.

Why tell this story? Other than it’s a great tale. I was thinking about how things have panned out for us over the past four years. Admittedly, it’s a fairly tenuous link as stories go. However, it’s 4 years to the day that we locked the door at 2 Mount Pleasant and swapped indoor space, a washing machine and easy access to day to day living for a forty three foot floating home with the potential to cruise the oceans.

Our sketchy plan was always New Zealand. We’ve been distracted along the way. We had no intentions of going to Bermuda or the East Coast of the States or Nova Scotia or Newfoundland or the Bahamas or Jamaica. There’s a saying that we’ve learnt from other boaters which states that any boat plans are written in sand. I’m super glad we did visit these places though. The people we’ve met and the friends we’ve made, is more reward than we could have dreamt of.

Today finds us on a relatively calm sea heading towards a point 82 miles away. It a cross on the chart plotter, just north of Darwin Island, Galápagos. We’ve psychologically broken this trip down into sections. Get out of Panama Bay, get to the Galápagos, cross the doldrums and the equator. Etc. Distance to go to Nuku Hiva is 3014 miles. Distance covered since Isla Contadora, Panama is around 900. It’s hard to tell with all our zig zagging.

Our New Zealand plan drifts closer. Time to assess our performance when we eventually get there. If indeed it even matters. In the meantime, I have time to ponder new millinery possibilities.

I laughed as a booby struggled to keep its balance on a small floating log, just a couple of metres from Grace as we sailed past. Our forward motion pushed a small wave of white water away from the hull and I almost heard this bird going “Whooa” as it wobbled back and forth trying to regain its balance. It chose not to use its wings to help steady itself, instead throwing some body popping shapes from its knees up. (Do birds have knees?) No way was it flying off its watery perch. “I’ve found a log, I’m staying here, thank you very much”.

More animal activity as I passed up the dinner plates into the cockpit last night, including delicious cabbage I hasten to add. A pod of spotted dolphins came over to play, distracting us from our dinner for a few minutes. Not just arched backs this time but full leaps out of the water. Always a happy sight.

Our departure was in two stages, although we hadn’t planned it that way. We were almost ready, so it was time to go. We’ve learnt over time that we are never 100% totally sorted so almost is good enough. The anchor came up around 1.30pm local time and we were off. No fanfare. No ticker tape. Just a quiet motor between Contadora and Seboga till the we put the sails up and pointed west.

Whilst setting up our aries self steering windvane, Dave commented on some stiffness in the adjustment mechanism. So we made the decision to sail south for around 4 hours to Pedro Gonzales and anchor up to check it out. Which is what we did. Some spannering, boiling water and silicon spray did the trick start.

We set off again at 01.15am when the current was favourable after an 8 hour pit stop. Pedro Gonzales is a hard place to leave. It’s a super quiet anchorage off a lovely sandy beach with a beauty to keep you there. Leaving in the dark removed some of that pull. But we have an ocean to cross. Better crack on.

Its breakfast time on the morning of day 2. I’m counting our 01.15am as our real departure time. So far the motor has been chugging more than we’d like. Getting out of the bay of Panama was always going to be a bit of a pig and that’s what we have experienced so far. Little wind or wind from the direction we want to go. For now, the combustion machine is not combusting.

All three sails are up and we were making 6 knots the right way. Short lived pleasure as the wind has dropped to diddly squat and we are making 3.5 knots in 6 knots of breeze. There’s a helpful current here enhancing the numbers.

We are in dilemma world. Do we motor to make progress? Motoring uses fuel and fuel is a limited resource. It’s also noisy and makes the cabin hot. Or do we sail very slowly, not necessarily in the right direction which is quieter but can be pretty frustrating due to the lack of progress. Covering the ocean between here and north of the Galápagos Islands is very much about positioning and not getting into any counter currents. The dilemma continues.

• 

This is apparently what it looks like according to an image on Mrs Google. Let’s hope it’s an accurate portrayal. Feasting my eyes on this after 6 weeks at sea will be most pleasant, thank you very much. And a hill to walk up too.

My plan to write something for the blog every week when we’re at sea. It’ll be the longest passage we’ve done, and possibly the longest passage we will ever do. I’m guessing around 4000 miles. It’s a flipping long way.

The lovely Lisa will have her fingers poised at the ready back in the UK to upload anything I write. Cheers me dear.

So folks, stay well. Who knows what the world will be like in another 6 weeks. Your guess is as good as mine. Bye for now.

I had a cabbage panic. This is not something I ever had when living in a house. We are about to embark on 5 or 6 or 7 weeks at sea. Not sure. The wind and currents will decide. Freshies become a bit of an obsession. And some things last better than others. Cabbages are up there!

What this meant was a final trip into a supermarket to acquire 4 white cabbages and an extra 20 oranges. No scurvy on this boat. Panama has reinstated lockdown so we were back to negotiating two hour windows when it was possible to be officially out and about from your home.

Yesterday evening at 6pm we officially left Panama City. All checked out with stamps in our passports and official paperwork. Grace has survived her last days in Las Brisas anchorage when a 60 foot tree tried to eat her. Our buddy Bill did some fending one day.

The tree revisited us as were about to get into bed at 11pm on night. We’d been out socialising hence the late night. I was aware of a scratching noise so onto deck I went. The blighter was being pushed into the hull by the current and wind. After lopping a few branches, (yes we have tree loppers on board) into the dinghy we hopped with the big torch and a line of rope.

20 minutes later we’d pulled the thing away from all the main part of the anchorage and let it go just above a sunken mast, hoping the branches would catch on this. There was no really good place to let it go and taking it to the shore was a non starter. All fun and games before bed.

I will get round to posting something brief again before we leave. Keep an eye out in a day or so. And as many tv shows say….here’s a reminder.

You can follow our progress should you choose on the tracking page of the blog. You have to click on this web link …..

http://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/GraceofLongstone

If we’re going slow, or it stops for some reason, don’t automatically go into panic mode. It’s computery stuff. Things break and stop working. We have amongst other things a sat phone, an SSB radio, a new life raft, a big torch and cabbages.