day 2

clouds
Originally uploaded by lawatt

day two (june 8) started off with fried-egg sandwiches with cheese, courtesy of David -- I'm not usually a big fan of fried eggs, but YUM, so tasty, and we were all craving protein after not eating much our first day at sea.

I didn't record many details from this day, I'm pretty sure the wind was mostly in the 20-knot range, and we made good progress -- at noon our location was 22ª 43' N, 156ª 38' W, and we'd traveled roughly 125 nautical miles in a straight line from our starting point, but of course we'd actually sailed around the island of Oahu, not through it, so our actual distance traveled was farther than that.

spent much of the day learning to live with the constant heel on starboard tack, which we'd stay on for the whole first week of the trip -- and I discovered that while I wasn't feeling seasick at all (none of us got sick the entire trip), I couldn't read or focus on anything detailed while down below, or I'd start feeling lousy. this meant I wasn't terribly helpful in the galley -- but I tried to make up for it by steering extra.

re: steering -- the boat has an autopilot, but it slurps power from the batteries at an enormous rate, which can only be recharged by running the engine -- and while we ran it a bit each day to charge 'em up, we were playing it conservative with diesel, since we didn't have enough to motor the whole trip, & our navigation instruments (among other things) were dependent on us having power -- so we used the engine as little as possible during the first part of the trip, only running it to recharge the batteries or if the wind got too light to sail with any decent speed.

and nightwatch (midnight to 3am) on day 2 was just brilliant -- David napped on the low side of the cockpit while I was steering, and we were passing under the most gorgeously black sky with zillions of stars -- so I could easily see the small dark puffs of cloud (that might or might not be squalls) against the sparkly sky -- and I got into such a wonderful groove of optimizing our course and speed, so that I felt like I was racing those clouds, picking our best path between them, and such satisfaction when their edges passed us by, looming darkly overhead but not causing us any trouble -- it reminded me of driving through Monument Valley in Utah, such huge shapes hovering high above our heads but letting us pass.

there were lots of shooting stars that night too -- somehow they felt like friends cheering us on as we sailed through the dark ocean night.