Halfway Across with Good Speed

Sorry for the late post, the day got away from me.

We have reached halfway, folks!! About 8 days and 1100 miles since Cabo Verde. With the wind speed picking up and with forecasts showing more consistency, we’re hopeful for smooth sailing in the second half of this adventure. Although, in some ways, it feels like the last third given our initial stretch starting in the Canaries.

The last couple days have brought small injuries - luckily nothing all that bad.

Yesterday Jan went to let out the tack line on the gennaker and, without the clutch and with lots of pressure on the sail, it completely ran through his fingers (except for the stopper knot). He’s thankful he had sailing gloves on, but the pads of his fingers got a pretty good burn that he iced most of the day. (Yay again for a freezer on the boat!) No card shuffling but otherwise seems like back to normal activities today.

As the wind increased overnight the waves picked up and I woke up to a rolling, pitching, yawing boat. I’m trying to convince my stomach to play it cool with mixed success, but mostly doing good. First thing this morning, in walking from my cabin to the main deck, I sprained my ankle. There was no big moment when it happened; my ankle was just a normal ankle and then all of a sudden it hurt and was kind of purple? Bizarre. Icing, an ace bandage, and ibuprofen are helpful and it’s not too bad. It’s not my first bruise of the trip: living on a boat has given me many bumps and bruises. It reminds me of when I was in grade school and my legs were constantly covered with bruises all over from sports and horsing around. I took pride in my bruises as a kid. Also, mom and dad, remember when I couldn’t go a week without a new hole in the knees of my pants? Can’t remember when that stopped happening.

These little dings are a good reminder to not become complacent out here. The mood is still good on board, but quiet: heavier seas encourage more nap time.

I wanted to teach you all about rolling, pitching, and yawing - the three motions of a boat. I was going to try to come up with some sort of pneumonic to make it easy to remember and this is as far as I got:

Pitch: think of a pitcher, they lean back and then bend over forward in the motion of the pitch

Roll: the same direction as a boat heels, also with a double letter; the only way a boat could rollover, side to side (this isn’t technically true but whatever)

Yaw: the y in ‘yaw’ is close to the letter z so yaw is turning around the z axis! Or, if you know pitch and roll, yaw is the other one.

Basically, I’m not feeling very creative today. Hope you learned something. :)

Last night’s sunset was one of my favorites so far. (Soph, this photo is dedicated to you:) It was incredible to me how the clouds all seemed to sit on a certain altitude, their bottoms entirely flat and pressed up against whatever invisible barrier was there. What causes that? A pressure difference? It reminded me of cats on glass tables. Don’t know what that is? Look it up, totally worth it.

It was actually quite an eventful day. We did laundry (much needed) and had more blue-cheese stuffed gnocchi for dinner which I loved, just as delicious as the first time around. We also watched a movie from Jan’s hard drive which was a lot of fun (Enemy of the State).

Yesterday we changed our phones over one time zone, today we’ll make another jump. It’s like falling back for daylight savings but we just get to do it for free! And twice! So now I think we’re only 5 hours ahead of PST. It rained a couple times over the last day - I love how it makes everything all shiny and washes away the salt crusted on the decks, hatches, and trampolines - and we got a flying fish visitor through the hatch on the starboard side.

Last note: I wanted to thank you all for your lovely comments. I finally figured out how to see which comments are from which people (the mobile version of Wix’s website manager is buggy) and I just feel so grateful for all of you. Thanks for following along with our journey.

Much love,

E