5/30/12

Noon Position: 33 04' S, 136 08' W, SOG 5.1, COG 048, Day's Run 125nm,
Week's Run 945nm. I'm a little bit worried that I've gotten too far
north too soon, as the breeze has come around to about ESE, leaving me
sailing close hauled. My last three week upwind journey off New Zealand
was uncomfortable for me and damaging for the boat, but today at least
the breeze is relatively light, 10-14 kts or so, and we're trundling
along upwind with the small jib and 1 reef in the main in an almost
pleasant manner - no waves over the top of the cabin, no slamming and
juddering and pounding off of steep square sided waves, no sickening
sideways lurches. The sun is shining, The solar panels are charging at
the highest voltage I've seen in well over a month, giving me hopes that
I may be able to get the resting voltage on my 12V batteries over 12V by
the time the sun sets, also for the first time in well over a month, and
if it weren't for the clammy puddle on the floor, the condensation still
dribbling down the shady side of the cabin and off the ceiling, and the
never-ending assault by mold, mildew, and assorted growths upon every
available surface one might even consider it civilized. I had almost
forgotten how comfortable and almost sailing could be in normal latitudes.

5/29/12

Noon Position: 34 27' S, 138 05' W, SOG 4.8, COG 050, Day's Run 140nm.
A few well intentioned emails have gotten me thinking about the future
for the past few days, about what lies ahead on shore. For almost a
year now my world has been focused on this trip, planning, preparing,
then sailing, first south, then forever east. The thought of returning
to shore to face the unknown has filled me with a mixture of black rage
and anxious dread. I've wished any number of times that I could just
keep on sailing east, but south America lies in the way, with Cape Horn
reaching down to the now icy depths of the pacific, and winter is here,
bringing with it increasingly violent weather that I'm now fleeing
from. I wonder if by turning North now I might be quitting before I've
gone far enough, but at the same time I'm afraid of going too far like
Santiago, losing myself as the winter takes great toothy bites out of me
and the boat alongside, leaving nothing but great bones washing through
the sea. If I could just catch the right wave, warm and gentle, to ride
around the world, but Odyssey is tired and so am I, wet and moldy and
breaking down. So instead I'm sailing back north towards the trades,
out of the fearsome and violent south, wondering where I'm bound.

5/27/12

Noon Position: 37 11' S, 142 36' W, SOG 6.5, COG 055, Day's Run 150nm.
I've replaced my crippled Kindle2 with my mom's old kindle which I
carried as a backup, and have been informed by sources of no ill repute
that it is best designated as either a "Kindle 3" or a "Keyboard
Kindle." It's certainly smaller and lighter than my kindle 2,
particularly as the replacement does not reside in a plastic
water-resistant housing, but in a gallon zip lock bag. From seeing it
before I left, I thought I would be bothered by the smaller buttons for
changing pages, but I don't mind them, and actually kind of like that I
can now change pages by squeezing the side of the kindle in addition to
the push from on top - this is of course made easier by the narrower
width. I am not at all happy with the relocation of the power switch
from the top left corner to the bottom right - maybe it's just because
I'm left handed, but I could pick up and turn on my kindle 2 one handed,
which despite all my awkward fumbling I have been unable to accomplish
the the "keyboard kindle." The only thing I can think of that might
work would be to display the text upside down, then I could use the
whole device upside down and hit the power switch left handed like I
used to. Another thing that bothers me is the lack of numbers on the
keyboard. I really only used the keyboard for occasional dictionary
references and going online with my kindle 2, the latter usage obviously
having been neglected the last several months. But I did use the number
keys frequently, too frequently actually, for typing in locations in the
book. This was necessitated by a feature-turned-flaw in the
interactions between my kindle 2 and its case - because of how the case
interfaced with the little joystick nubbin, a funny look or the brush of
a blanket when I put the kindle down to go deal with the sails would
frequently send the kindle off on a chapter-hopping spree, often leaving
me with no way to return to my starting point when I returned, other
than typing in locations in 100 unit increments to zero in on my spot.
With the Keyboard kindle this seems to have been obviated by the little
square arrow buttons instead of a super-touchy joystick poking through a
rubbery sleeve in a housing, but has created a new challenge. The back
button is directly underneath the down arrow, and I've noticed that any
number of times my fat thumbs have inadvertently hit back instead of
scrolling the cursor down a page to look up a word, leaving me in the
same straits as before, but with a difference. With my Kindle 2,
depending on what seemed to be whimsy (but I suspect may have in fact
have something to do with the format of the ebook, whether it was a
.mobi from a non-amazon source or whatever the DRM'd amazon format is
called) I could sometimes use the back button to undo all my joy-stick
driven chapter hops, but with the keyboard kindle, one cannot use the
back button to undo it's own actions, leaving me awkwardly trying to
type in locations without a number pad. To be fair, I suspect that
there must be some method of returning to the furthest page in the book
that has been read, known to those who are kindle-savvy (or at least
read the manual), but in my curmudgeonly way I just poke away at the
keys. I feel a little bit like I imagine my mother does when she's
using a computer, mystified and surprised as lights flash and things go
"beep!" I don't really have any excuse for not reading the manual other
than sheer Ludditery, to use a word that greatly angers my
spellchecker. But, I figure that I'm sailing around the world by myself
on a 35 year old boat, so I figure I've got a little bit of an excuse,
computer-science degree or no. A lot of the books I had on my kindle
were from non-Amazon sources, primarily Project Gutenberg and Baen
Publishing's e-book store, which I have reason to be grateful for in
this instance. Since my mom's kindle is still registered as hers, it
has a whole slew of new books on it, but I can't transfer any of my
amazon purchases between kindles. Fortunately Baen is an enlightened
publisher and has had success selling non-DRM'd ebooks (and in fact
offering up a significant free library), and project Gutenberg obviously
does as well, so I was able to finish the book I was in the middle of by
transferring it to the new kindle, along with a few others I had been
planning on reading soon.

5/25/12

Noon Position:  38 31' S, 148 14' W, SOG 5, COG 065, Day's Run 135nm.  My Kindle, which has been warning me for the past few months that it's battery was slowly dying and that I really should go out and buy another Kindle or two from Amazon, finally decided today that it had had enough of my malingering and kicked the bucket.  When I turned it on this morning, the portrait of Virginia Woolf vanished from all but the top right quarter of the screen, where it merely faded and blurred, leaving me with a reading device that only lets me read the first half of the lines on the top half of the page.  On the plus side, I got the engine running today without much fuss, a prospect that I was a bit nervous about given the fairly shoddy state of my batteries and the number of weeks since I last turned it over.

5/23/12

Noon Position: 39 59' S, 153 31' W, SOG 5.6, COG 090, Day's Run 130nm,
Week's Run 937nm. This concludes the first week in the past month that
I've run over 800nm, also the first week that I've actually been able to
sail downwind. In eating a pack of WASA cardboard-crackers, I've
discovered one of the secrets of dieting: The "light" version of the
crackers are no more card-boardy than the normal crackers, just half as
thick. Same number of calories in a package, just twice as many
crackers, so I don't get as fat per cracker, although how anyone could
do much more than waste away eating even the normal crackers I'm not
sure. I brought a bunch of them because I thought they'd last better
than wheat thins and triscuits and chex mix, which has not proved to be
the case, but my enthusiasm for the more delicious crackers has left me
with a solid wall full of bricks of rye crisps that I now am starting to
gnaw my way through, normal and "light" alike.

5/21/12

Noon Position: 42 16' S, 158 35' W, SOG 5.3, COG 070, Day's Run 115nm.
Our position has moved onto a new chart, officially called "South
Pacific Ocean - Sheet II," but which I prefer to think of as bearing the
more grandiloquent title "The Vast Uncharted Wasted of the South
Pacific" Stretching from the Equator to 60S, and from 160W to 110W, the
top half of the chart is speckled with the island of French Polynesia,
but the south half is a void. A few lines of soundings run here and
there, from some survey ship unfortunate enough to be sent across the
waters, and there are a few specks reporting "breakers reported, 1978"
or "discolored water reported, 1947", but even these vanish south of
40S, leaving just a vast white emptiness crossed by lines of latitude
and longitude. In the far south of the Indian and the Atlantic there
were scattered islands and lots of depth soundings, but the far South
Pacific is a void. I can easily imagine bored sailors filling up the
space with doodles of sea monsters and storms, just to have something to
look at as the dots of position march along across the page.

5/20/12

Noon Position: 42 27' S, 161 08' W, SOG 4.5, COG 110, Day's Run 140nm.
The last 3 or 4 days have been beautiful sailing during the day and
frustrating squally nights, with not much continuous sleep to be had. I
just finished reading Anna Karenina, and my dreams have been haunted by
unpronounceable Russian nobility, filling roles completely unrelated to
Russians or nobility. Going back to sleep after adjusting the sails I
stayed awake a few extra minutes, trying to figure out how to pronounce
the names of the gas station attendant, yacht captain, or cab driver
whose unpronounceability had featured prominently just before I awoke.
I'm pretty sure my mother even appeared with a Russian name. Just
writing about it now has me silently trying to sound out some of the
worst as I type. Last night, instead of a host of Russians inhabiting
my dreams, I had a host of weather inhabiting my waking hours. One of
the weaknesses of the GRIB weather files I've been using is a tendency
to strongly underestimate the winds associated with a frontal passage.
When I looked at noon yesterday, I was reassured by seeing max
windspeeds of 25 kts or so through the night. So I was frustrated as
the breeze built to a solid 30 from the NNW by nightfall, growing
increasingly squally with lots of lightning flashes lighting up the
clouds all around, oddly enough unaccompanied by thunder. Finally
around 0130 this morning I had to strike the main in a nasty squall,
which proceeded to blow 40+ knots for the next four hours as Odyssey
rocketed down waves rigging thrumming and screaming, seldom seeing
speeds under 7 kts as we surfed fast under just the staysail. This
morning the breeze finally eased back down to the mid 30s and has slowly
been backing off throughout the day, but is still certainly blowing
harder than the smooth and lovely 20kts W wind forecasted for 6am this
morning. Looking at the weather forecasts is a bit of a weakness of
mine - most of the time even knowing what's coming there's not a whole
lot I can do about it, especially at the moment as I'm trying to get
back north, but I still religiously pull down GRIBS daily and stare at
the contents, as if somehow through sheer willpower I can affect what
we're going to get.