January 20, 2004
Today has been a great sailing day. An idyllic sailing day. The kind of sailing day that non-sailors think all sailing days are like. The kind, I guess I have to confess, we hardly ever get: a nice warm summer day in the middle of the ocean, blue sky, blue sea, gentle wind, making good time towards a new south seas tropical paradise. Its quiet, it's calm. We are relaxed and living the good life.
Yesterday was pretty nice too.
It sounds like I am being sarcastic, but I'm not. This is a really nice day.
Today I sat in my arm chair in the cockpit, cool under the shade awning, and read a good novel, listening to some very, very, good old music on the stereo: Clapton, old stuff, very nice.
The wind vane was steering.
How good is that?
Judy baked some biscuits, because our bread from Kavieng, finally after 6 days, started to go moldy. We cut off the mould and ate the last piece for breakfast. That's good timing, when you finish the last piece of bread just as it starts to go bad.
But...you say?
No buts. The passage so far has been a soft passage, (as opposed to a hard passage, and we've had some of them in the past too).
The first day out of Kavieng was pretty nice; it was good to be at sea and sailing again.
Then we had two and a half days of lumpy seas combined with light and variable winds, interrupted by squalls and rain. That was tough sailing, not dangerous, just hard work, and stressful, because the squalls threatened to be intense, but we survived it OK. We went slow, got sail off when the squalls came, or when we couldn't see if they were coming or not, like at night, stayed dry, took it easy.
The evening of the fourth day we sailed into a huge gray cloud bank that came right down to the water. It looked ominous, like nothing I've ever seen before. It went from one horizon to the other. Again we shortened sail. Behind this bank of clouds the weather changed. The variables and lumpy seas left. We got steady northerly winds. The air was cooler.
We were on port tack, as we had been since leaving Kavieng, and we sailed into the knock for a while. Then we tacked onto starboard and into a nice, long, lift.
The stars came out
Since then...well, like I said, it's been idyllic sailing. You should try it.
We still have 600 miles to go to Palau. Maybe this weather won't hold. But maybe it will.
We'll let you know.
Fred & Judy, SV WINGS, Western Pacific Ocean, on passage.