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November 3, 1998
San Francisco to Hawaii, Second Attempt. Update #43
43. Date: Tue, 3 Nov 98 05:06:37 GMT
Latitude: 25 degrees 01.719 minutes North
Longitude: 142 degrees 12.959 minutes West
Wind ENE, Force 3
Heading 225 degrees (M)
The wind has been flukey all day. At times when a squall with accompanying rain over takes us from the east we find ourselves spinning along at a fair lick of 3-4 knots. These bursts rarely last for more than an hour or two at the most, then we have to make do with a light breeze and sweat a little. Still, we can't complain -we've had it so good recently. Our westerly track still seems to be out-performing our southerly one, so we have correspondingly adjusted 10 more degrees from yesterday to take into account westerly 0.5 knot drift from current and windage.
This afternoon I ventured for what I pray to be the last time into the black hole of our stern storage compartment, to forage enough food to last us till Hawaii. For 1.5 hours I dug around in the chaos of old rubbish bags, spent gas canisters and other assorted paraphernalia, searching for bags of chili-con-carne, Mars Bars, M&M's and a lone tin of rice. For those of you who have seen the size of this compartment and for even fewer of you who saw the amount of junk we managed to squeeze into it prior to our departure from San Francisco, you will have some idea of the torture of squishing oneself into a tight ball and rolling around inside there amidst bags of smelly garbage while being repeatedly beaten over the head by the side of the boat. Terrible experience.
After this ordeal I take a dip in the big blue; Oh-so good! So instantly revitalizing! The cold jump-starts the senses that become so deadened with the claustrophobia of being 'indoors' for so much of the time. At least for a while that is until the realization hits that there's 2-3 miles of water underneath you. Scary when you think about it for too long.
Finally, our presence was graced in the early hours of this morning by 'Unlucky Jeff' -a 6" flying fish whose air-brakes must have failed on final approach, hence arriving DOA (dead on arrival). Beautiful thing, with amazing extended fins -successfully adapted over the millenia to escape predators. Being the first almost living thing we've seen in nearly two weeks, we gave him full burial honors before returning him to the deep. Poor old unlucky Jeff. What are the chances of hitting a 26'x4' pedal boat in 1,000's miles of open ocean to fly free in!
The wisdom tooth is stabilizing -no worse thankfully...
Lewis & Smith,
The Moksha crew
Posted on November 3, 1998 6:41 PM