Jun 21 2009
06-21-2009
23.09 N 121.52 W 620 miles southwest of San Diego
Wariness keeps talk of finishing this voyage to a minimum. Like the saying about never asking a woman if she’s pregnant unless you actually see a baby coming out of her, we’re circumspect of calling this journey done until a nice U.S. Customs officer welcomes us back into our country.
So here’s us on Father’s day and summer solstice, paying for these last drops of water slipping under the keel with either fossil fuel or sleep or both. Light and variable is what they call our present conditions. There are other, less pleasant words, that one might use to properly describe the sensation of just enough wind, on one side or the other of Tawodi’s nose, to make going where we want to go feel like we’ve become hapless salmon swimming upstream, but those words are best left mumbled quietly to oneself.
We tack from one side to the other and back and then we do it again. The wind falters and we motor sail. The wind collapses, we put the sails away and motor. The wind resuscitates itself and we reverse the circle; motor sail, sail, tack, tack, tack. We stare at the weather picture and find ourselves weirdly longing for a low pressure system, granted the longing is for a low pressure system confined within a rather demanding set of parameters.
Sleep ships itself off our vessel as the whimsy of our situation demands constant attention, constant fussing. Odd to realize how much simpler it was to work through a 40 knot blow, there’s not much more to do than set your self and your sails and wait it out. 10 to 15 knots shifting about here and there and voila: now you must do more than sponge the water off the floor and hold on, now there’s sail handling, course management, choice.
Fortune gives us all this work in company with mild temperatures, postcard sunsets and enough wisdom to let us realize what our work is purchasing; home and the chance for more than an hours worth of uninterrupted sleep.
Until then we grow punchier by the day and down caffeine as if it were the elixir of life. Until then we note the passage of our eighth month since our beginning, the arrival of summer solstice and, most cogently, Father’s day.
A happy wish to all the Fathers out there, most especially, our very own.