day 8 - flat calm and birds

birds
Originally uploaded by lawatt

from my journal:
"day 8 (thurs) at 7am -- we must be right underneath the pacific high, as the sea's gone completely still -- a strange silvery blue stretching out in all directions under a still-overcast sky -- it seems so strange that an ocean that's been so consistently restless for so many days can also suddenly be so quiet -- after all, it's a continuous body of water, should the waves elsewhere at least cause sloshes here? I understand the physics of it, but that doesn't make it any less strange -- and completely wonderful as well."

we spent the day with the motor and autopilot on, otherwise we'd have made no progress at all -- at noon our position was 34° 44' 8" N, 143° 23' 3" W, having gone roughly 140 nautical miles in the past 24 hours -- slowing down as the wind got lighter and lighter! 1028 miles to go to san francisco (and pearl harbor was now 1120 miles behind, having crossed the halfway point)

food report: David made a monster quesadilla for breakfast, which Mouse called "the quesadilla from hell" -- some huge number of eggs, cheese, and onions all neatly sandwiched between two tortillas and cooked in voluminous quantities of butter... damn that was tasty.

and they are small in this picture, but hopefully you can see two small dark birds -- i've not been able to identify them precisely, I think some kind of storm petrel? we saw them constantly all trip long, they flew in erratic fluttery patterns, almost like bats -- and at night they often followed the boat's transom closely, perhaps better able to see fishes in the aft light?

we also saw occasional albatrosses, but they seemed to know when I had a camera out & stayed far from the boat unless I was camera-free -- elusive creatures, and utterly beautiful to watch them flying -- and even more occasionally a tern flew past, but that's it for the bird life on the open sea...