Position: 17 degrees, 22 minutes south; 179 degrees, 40 minutes east
By Lisa-
We hove-to tonight around 5:30pm to listen to the Drifters Net on SSB, enjoy our Charismas, and have some fine dining courtesy of Ann – pesto tortellini with a salad of tomatoes and avocados. We are trying to get rid of the last of the fresh food before checking into Fiji customs – hopefully tomorrow, and Ann did a fine job throwing it all together. But since tomorrow is Saturday, we are not sure if customs will be available, or if we will have to wait until Monday. We are keeping our fingers crossed for a Saturday check in! It would be nice to get the first few loads of wet, stinky clothes into a washing machine, the first step in getting the boat all cleaned up and put back together after a long crossing.

Ann and I did some “goofing off” today. We dug out the Go-Pro camera and took some video of the non-stop wind and waves that kept coming at us yet again today. Then we created a training video on how to properly dispose of your blue bucket while underway in heavy seas on a starboard tack. We will post it on Youtube once we find some internet. Down the road, look for Part II on disposing your bucket on a port tack in all weather conditions. I think that after 10 days of practice, we have finally mastered the technique of ‘pick-and-roll’ using the salon table in a squatting position during the roll. Quite impressive! Not a drop spilled yet (knock on teak!).

Once this nasty squall that is currently attacking us passes on by, we will be under way again for one more night. Ahhhh, we are all looking forward to long stretches of uninterrupted sleep and a calm anchorage. But for now – all is well in the blue waters of Fiji.

Position: 18 degrees, 48 minutes south; 179 degrees, 06 minutes east

The spinnaker rescue

Ahh, it wasn't that bad...

You better believe I wore my tether up there!

That’s what Lisa said when after setting the jib successfully for the first time in two days and seeing it give us some good speed in winds in the high 20s, yet another weather system descended on us and slammed us with winds up to 40 knots. We had to roll the jib back in. Then it started raining. I’m waiting for the lightning followed by the waterspout at this point.

This has been the worst two weeks of weather I’ve ever had to sail in. Not fun. Both Ann and I agree though that having Lisa on board has been fun and she’s a real asset as crew. For example-today in one of the particularly vicious gusts (and while I was attempting to sleep on my “off” shift) Lisa noticed a wave that had come over the bow (just one you ask? Ha, one of the hundreds) broke the spinnaker bag from its clips on the lifelines on the bow and it was floating around on the foredeck untethered getting ready to make the big escape over the side. Without any thought to her personal safety or dignity, she crawled along the leeward deck-which was mostly underwater at this point-reached said bag (which is almost as large as she is) and did an imitation of an aquatic bear hug on the thing, patiently waiting for me to put on foul weather gear and come up to help. As I made my way to the foredeck I could see her laying on top of the bag taking breaths of air between the solid water coming down the deck. Well, we’ll have to get some pictures up soon to show at least the aftermath of where we were. Both of us were soaked despite wearing our foulies and she spent some time later pouring water out of her boots.

When Ann asked her how she felt about her adventure Lisa’s comment-“oh, we learned that in survival school at the Air Force” Well, thank you Lisa for saving our spinnaker!

Position: 20 degrees, 27 minutes south; 178 degrees, 21 minutes east

A very bumpy, or more like rock and roll, ride today. We’re just not catching a break this trip on the weather. After lightning, squalls and whathaveyou, now for today, tomorrow and most of Friday we have winds in the high 20’s/low 30’s and ocean swells up to 18 feet. Unfortunately for us, we have to run about parallel to both in order to get into Savusavu. It’s not much fun. We’re leaving open the option a this point to duck behind one of the islands that is about 80 miles away right now and just “hide” behind it until the wind and waves go away-which should be about Saturday. A tough call at this point. We’d like to get in and could possibly do it late Friday afternoon, but it’s a rough ride to to it done. We’ll see how tonight goes. The wave height is supposed to peak around midnight or so and then start to go down. Will be much nicer when the moon comes out as well, as pitch dark is not very friendly when there are waves all around and the wind is shrieking in the rigging.

That’s it for now-too rough to type 😉

Postion: 22 degrees, 09 minutes south; 177 degrees 33 minutes east

Finally getting a little nice sailing

This kind of weather is why we keep coming back

Half way there and we're still friends!

From Ann: Last night turned out to be a glorious night for a sail. The moon still looked full as it played peek-a-boo through the clouds. We haven’t seen the moon since it was full. It’s nice to get the benefit of the moonlight and to enjoy the twinkling stars. I never get tired of moonlight sailing. The only downside of last night’s watch was the exhaustion left over from the prior night’s great adventures. Lisa and I were bound and determined to give Capt’n Bob a well-deserved six hours of uninterrupted sleep and as the watch started it looked like it would be a piece of cake. That was at 9 pm. At 10 pm Lisa and Ann are having a conversation to help stay awake. This is how it went. Lisa: “So Ann, how many quilts do you think you have made?” (good start Lisa, we all know Ann can talk about quilts for hours) Ann: “Probably about 200” ….. (and off she goes. Until Ann realizes she is putting even herself to sleep and so she stops.) Lisa: “I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open”. Ann: “Me too!” (Note that we have a little less than five hours to go on this watch.) Ann: “How about we take turns napping. Go ahead and close your eyes. I will wake you in 30 minutes.” Success. Lisa snoozes. Ann stargazes for the next half hour. Then we swapped. When Lisa woke me after 30 minutes it was from a deep sleep! But it felt great. And turns out that 30 minutes was all I needed. Well almost. Enter Angry Birds to entertain Ann. Suffice it to say that I was able to finish our watch AND many levels of Angry Birds without waking Lisa. Well-deserved sleep. And today has been beautiful and sunny. The water is the deep blue that our friends on Eagle’s Wings promised. But the wind is blowing 25-30 knots from behind us which makes Charisma surf down the 2.5 meter waves. Picture a five year old boy pretending to be an airplane with his arms extended. He zooms across the ground with his arms dipping up and down to catch the good air currents. That’s what it feels like on Charisma today. And in a boat built like Charisma that means rolling from rail to rail in the water. When Charisma rolls like this the crew gets their daily calisthenics. The best ab workout around! Workouts are everywhere on a boat. Capt’n Bob gets a great one with every sail change as he hoists the sails. We, the crew, work our arm muscles with every crank of the winch and pull of a sheet. And then there is the balancing needed to move about a cabin in these rolly conditions. You can imagine the skill it takes to perform bucket brigade duties without spills. We are definitely getting into shape. In fact we think we have each lost at least a stone (that’s for our fans at Riddlesden!).

We have just dropped the main and put up the storm trysail with the jib. The wind is gusting well into the 30’s and it’s just more comfortable with the smaller sails and we’re still doing up to 9 knots. It seems to have settled the rolling a bit. Good for Charisma time.

We got too close too the low and got...triple reef weather.

By Ann and Lisa- We had come up with a game plan – skirt the low to the south, wait for it to pass above us and onto the southeast, then we would be on our merry way headed direct for Fiji. All was well in our little corner of the world as Captain Bob went below to bed and Ann and Lisa were left on watch around 9:30PM. We were motoring due west in very light winds – and since R2D2 (the auto pilot) wasn’t feeling well tonight we were hand steering Charisma. No problem – according to the latest gribs, we were just on the edge of the little low passing above us. We expected light winds through the night until we made our right hand turn to 360 at 6am the next morning. We took turns at the wheel, 30 minutes on – 30 off, for the first few hours. Around 11:30 the wind picked up so we set the main sail and continued to motor sail. “Under control” was our motto – having every best intention to let Captain Bob get some well needed shut eye until his watch began at 3am. Well…. the high seas had other plans for us! The winds continued to pick up, and by 1am, our little corner of the world looked like a washing machine out of control!

Part II: Enter Captain Bob to the rescue By Bob- It was nice and cozy in the quarterberth and since Charisma is a solid boat, I didn’t hear all the commotion going on up on deck. For all I knew, we were in 15 knots of wind having a nice night…

But I did get awakened. “Bob, come quick. It’s getting really windy!” My first though; “Yeah, whatever”. But once out of bed I had a look up the companionway hatch and was shocked to see that both of the foul weather boards were in and the hatch was closed and torrential rain was pouring against them. My second thought at this point in my sleepy haze: “You want me to go up in that!!?” At this point I snapped out of my semi-coma and realized we needed to do something. I wasn’t sure what, but knew that once I went out on deck in this mess it was going to be a long night. So…I took my time getting dressed properly in foulies, warm socks, seaboots, etc. I’ve spent way too many a night shivering in shorts and a tee-shirt after charging onto the deck only to realize there’s no going back down in foul weather.

Anyway, once on deck here’s what I saw. Charisma was doing her imitation of a runaway freight train. With something on the level of mid-thirties wind, maybe higher (our wind speed is broken) with just a double reefed main up Charisma was boiling along at 10 KNOTS. Yes, that’s the first thing that caught my attention. We were going waaay to fast. My first thought was since we already had a double reef, we needed to furl the jib, so I worked my way in position to do that only to find “the girls” had already done that. OK, 10 knots, main only. Too. Fast.

The next thing I noticed-at first out of the corner of my eye and not quite fully conscious of it- was that Lisa was at the helm and fighting for her life to keep Charisma from rounding up. She had half a turn of the wheel correcting for the out of balance helm caused by having only the main up-but more interestingly, HER FEET WERE COMING OFF THE DECK she was working so hard to steer against Charisma’s power in the gusts.

So in my muddled state, still a bit wonky from just waking up, I took over the helm and set the wind vane. At least now we would have some time to think with Wilson taking charge of the steering. That worked pretty well until a really big gust decided to take over. ” I’ve got the helm again”. That’s when I realized what I should have noticed right at the get go: something’s gonna break if we don’t slow down right now. So, we hove to (non-sailors will have to look up this term, also called Heave To or Heaving To). Simple, painless, easy. Took about 30 seconds and everything got calm and quiet. Except the rain. You couldn’t even see the bow of the boat it was pouring down so hard.

You see, we planned to skirt the south side of the low, but came a little too close and hit the front of the lower side of the low. Heavy rain, high winds. The good news is it didn’t last too long before we were in the dregs behind the low. Then we just sat hove to for the rest of the night waiting for the weather to improve. It did and we’re now following part two of the plan, which is following the south winds behind the low due north to Fiji. 400 miles and we’ll be there. We’ve also posted a second blog which analyses our No-Lo Maneuver Tactic. Enjoy!

By Lisa and Ann

Lesson 1: When the grib says there is a low there – believe it is really a low, and not just a No Low. And just because the grib file doesn’t have the bright red colors near the low, don’t assume it won’t pack a punch!

Lesson 2: Don’t get too cocky reading your grib files thinking you can just skirt the southern edge of the low and dance on by. The gribs aren’t that meticulously accurate out here in the middle of the ocean – and things can change in a matter of hours. Give the Low plenty of space when passing by.

Lesson 3: Get Captain Bob out of bed sooner than later. We cut it just a little too close last night – waiting to wake up Bob as the wind and waves grew. We were trying to give him as much sleep as possible, but could have had some nasty ramifications had we waited much longer. Since Ann and I don’t know the boat, nor have the strength to handle the boat like Bob can – we need to be a bit more conservative next time and rustle him out of bed sooner rather than later. We got very lucky last night!

Lesson 4: Heaving to can be a good thing! And actually much more relaxing than fighting the storm. Ann and I actually enjoyed a cold beer together at 2:30 in the morning once we hove to and got settled in.

Lesson 5: Never drink a beer at 2:30 in the morning when you are working the bucket brigade. Makes for a short night of sleep, and another trip through the salon and up the companion way just to get rid of it at 6am!

Position: 25 degrees, 03 minutes south; 176 degrees, 58 minutes east

(Chicken in green curry sauce for dinner) Looking at our gps shows a distinct 90 degree left turn yesterday and then a meandering track, generally to the northwest, most of today. We’re still tracking to try and go just to the south of the low, and the barometer and wind are saying that we might be in the right place. It’s very calm and peaceful right now and we’re motoring for the first time since day one. We expect the low to cross above us around midnight and should see a wind shift that lets us turn due north for Fiji.

Not too much else to say for today. We’re just biding our time right now for another six or so hours to see what happens next.

Postion: 25 degrees, 43 minutes south; 178 degrees, 31 minutes east

I’ll explain the title in a minute. First, this is a bit of our log for the day.

0300-“Full, glorious moon. Just beautiful! I love to watch its reflection dancing across the wind swept waves”

Lisa plotting the weather on her iPad

A bit of a change in plan. Last night after downloading the latest weather off the radio we could see that a potentially nasty low pressure system is setting up to the north. It looks likely to be sliding right down onto our course and our planned stop at Minerva Reef. It wouldn’t be any fun to be in that weather nor would it be fun to be anchored inside a reef in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a “disturbance” such as this. So, the decision was made to bag going to Minerva and find a way around the low instead of just following our course and slamming right into it. No Bueno.

Being high tech Yachties, we loaded the weather file onto Lisa’s iPad and using iNavx, she was able to track the low over the next four days right on a gps chart of our course and plot a new course that has us going (hopefully) clockwise around the south side of the low.

The wind circulation of a low in the southern hemisphere rotates clockwise. The low is traveling from west to east as well, so the northeast quadrant has the highest winds and worst weather. This is because you get the windspeed based on the pressure gradients as well as the added speed of the low across the ocean. Anyway, by diverting around the south side, we get the lighter winds and once past the center of the low can pick up a south wind that will take us up to Fiji. That’s the theory at last. Keep watching over the next couple days to see how it works.

By the way, we now call lows like this “NoLows” because Lisa’s husband John sent us an email this morning that started off by saying there were “no lows in our vicinity”. He then went on to describe the low that’s coming down from the northwest. We all looked at each other; “huh?”. Must be a NoLow low. Hence the new name.

On the boat repair report, I won’t go through all the stuff that we’ve found that needed attention except to say that we found a significant tear on the leech of the brand new stays’l. About two feet along the seam up the leech, about two thirds up the sail. Bummer. We hove to for about an hour and dropped the sail to let Ann put some sail repair tape on it and hand sew a few stiches on top – a fine job! But – white tape on a brand new red sail – grrrrrrrhhh! Not a great advertisement for the sailmaker. I’m going to have to email them for a chat.

Our brand new staysail didn't match up to the squalls

Ann patching the staysail

We'll fix this better when we can break out the sewing machine and proper red sailcloth.

Cool new fun toy alert. The Brookhouse “iMux” black box that I connected to Charisma’s electronics is really proving to be useful. It sends all the boat data from the electronics, as well as gps and ais to my iPad and iPhone via wifi. Combined with iNavx which is a must have navigation app for the iPad, I can sit anywhere on the boat and see where we’re going, how fast, water depth, wind and even if there are any ships near us. A must have for iGeeks. Just make sure you have a waterproof case (as I have) so your iPad doesn’t get wet!

Sidenote: Ann and Lisa have gotten pretty good at setting up the boat. I really haven’t been doing much of the sailing so far-by the time I come on watch, they pretty much have Charisma trimmed for speed and the sails and wind vane (Wilson) all tuned up.

LOL-Those of you who know Lisa will understand this story. Orcinius (her boat) doesn’t have a wind vane, they have a powered autopilot. Set a course, push a button. Nice! On Charisma we have the wind vane. An ungainly, but endearing looking structure bolted onto the stern whose purpose is to harness wind power to steer the boat. Having never used a wind vane before but knowing that is what makes Charisma sail the seas, the day she stepped aboard and looked at the contraption that is our wind vane (lovingly known as Wilson), Lisa has been eyeing Wilson with an “I’m going to own you” silent glare. It took a couple days, and I have to say that it takes a while for most people to learn to use a wind vane correctly, but in just a couple days she’s cracked the code. It’s part art and part physics and Wilson seems to have developed a genuine respect of her abilities and is behaving admirably.

New friends, Lisa and Wilson

Quote of the day: From Lisa-“There is no one I’d rather share a bucket with than you guys!”

Lisa comment: Yes – we are coming up with new blue bucket stories daily. But trust me – what happens in the bucket stays on the boat? (oh my – that didn’t come out right!).

Hi guys. Thanks for all the comments, we’ve enjoyed reading them. I tried to send an email but it bounced. I must have copied it wrong. If you want to sailmail me your address I’ll try again. Bob

Position: 29 degrees, 13 minutes south 178 degrees, 21 minutes east

Drying out the foulies takes up the whole cabin

Thank goodness we had a nice day since last night was a brutal one. That was the height of the low that came across and while the waves were only in the 3 meter or so range, the wind was really gusting. We estimate it was a constant high 20s gusting somewhere into the 30s all night. We had a double reef and stays’l and were rail down. Then the gusts would hit and we’d round up a bit, the sails would shake the rig for from 10 seconds to a minute in the high gusts and then we’d be back to smoking along. We did about 140 miles, so were averaging 6 knots in that configuration. No lightning though, so I can’t totally complain too much.

We sailed out of the low sometime around 0900. Just like that we were in milder weather. It was pretty sudden. There was total darkness, rain, and gusty wind, then a couple hours after sunrise, we just sailed out of the clouds into the clear. I could look back and see the huge black squall still raining behind us and clear sky ahead. The barometer is up 5 to 1015, so that’s another sign. Anyway, we’ve been sailing all day in about 15-20 on the beam. We’ve had a double reef, stays’l and jib and are making about 6 knots. If it gets squally again this evening we can just furl the jib, so it’s a nice combo to have up. Not super fast, but the wind vane likes it and the flexibility to just furl and unfurl from the cockpit instead of having to go up to the mast to reef and un-reef the main is nice. Looks like tomorrow’s wind are getting lighter though, so we might shake out one or two of the reefs for the first time since leaving NZ.

Since it was a calmer day, we also had a real dinner tonight instead of pre-made. The first two days out we ate the pressure cooker beans, ham and potato thing I made Sunday night. No cook, just heat. Then last night was still too rough to conveniently cook, so Ann just heated up some soup. So it was nice this evening to actually be able to make something fresh. I made a stir fry pork and cabbage with ginger-garlic and peanuts. It wasn’t bad considering I’ve never made it before.

And the bucket brigade continues...

No progress on the blocked head so the “Bucket Brigade” continues exercises. The funny part is that it (the process of emptying the potty bucket) has become normal activity. Sailors are flexible people. Ann’s thought for the day is that we are still in the clothes we put on the first night. Some layers are coming off as the weather warms or the rain ceases. Fortunately none of us seem to smell too much, or perhaps our own fragrances provide cover for all. Just another sailing adaptation. We are all hoping tomorrow will bring weather warm enough for a cockpit shower! Lisa’s comment: It’s nice, and very noticeable to finally be in the 20’S! I have packed away my warmest gear today, and am looking forward to breaking out some shorts and t-shirts in a couple of days. Yes – last night was a busy one! Ann and I would take turns sitting in the companion way looking forward while the other would be alongside in the cockpit tucked up inside the dodger. We kept up the conversation to keep our minds off the weather, but every once in a while the companionway sitter would shout “WAVE!” and we would both brace ourselves for the onslaught of a big one breaking over the bow and into the cockpit, then carry on wherever we had just left off. Sure helped to make the night pass by much quicker having a buddy to get through the big ones with. Hopefully tonight we won’t have to be shouting WAVE so often! Oh yeah – and nothing like handing your bucket up to your friend and sharing in the days outcome! That’s enough on that subject! So that’s it for now, we’ll see you all tomorrow…