Pacific Crossing Day 14

Most days at the 06:00 AM shift change the eastern sky glows in the pre-dawn. If you are the one going off watch you want to duck down below and try to get to sleep before Mr. Sun shows his face. This morning when Connie came up to relieve me, the east horizon was still dark as sin. Are the clocks wrong? It's time to take a look at the the time zone chart!

We are at about 141 degrees west. That's 19 degrees west of Seattle. Almost a thousand miles. So lets see:
Pacific time (Seattle) is from longitude 105 to 120... sort of
Alaska time is 120 to 135 longitude
Pitcairn time is 135 to 150 longitude ( This is where we are now )
Hawaii time is 150 - 165 longitude

Oops, what happened to Alaska time. Did we miss it? I guess so.

So today we'll just change our clocks back two hours. Whoever has the shift when we do so gets another two hours added on to their shift. My job is to ensure that it's not my shift when this occurs. Let some other poor sucker have their shift extended two hours.

Note the spray in the sun

Connie wakes up this morning suddenly hot and fussy. "I gotta get outta here." She bolts upright, throws on some clothes, and leaves the master cabin. I get up and see Scott Tobiason in the cockpit, in the full sun, working on his tan which is already extreme. Even his feet are tan, even on the bottom!

Connie flops down on the floor amidships where it is the coolest. Then she says, "I smell something burning, maybe rubber?" Now it's fire alarm time and I have to shake off the sleep and pay attention. We open up cabinets, look into the engine compartment and the prop shaft compartment, until finally Connie determines that the smell is coming from forward. She pries open the floorboard to check the forward bilge. "It smells like it's coming from here." Scott Tobiason, who has no sense of smell, rushes past me to poke his head into the forward bilge. I stand by, useless. Pump - OK, Switch - OK. It's just some black water smell that the heat has brought because it is really hot this morning.

I check the head sink, which shares a thru hull exit with the forward bilge pump and who do I see crawling out of the drain but Herman the crab! We have a tiny mascot. I hope he likes it in Hawaii.

Full of excess energy Connie decides to wash some clothes. Meanwhile nobody has had breakfast yet. What a disorganized mess of a crew we are.

There is hardly any wind. What wind there is comes from the South. None of the weather grib files we have downloaded show any southerly component. And so, we motor on.

Pausing to check the engine the crew decides to swim with the sharks. We let Traveler ghost along til she slows down then Scott T. and Connie B. jump overboard into the endless depths of the center of the great Pacific Ocean. I'm tempted to start up the engine and drive away. They come back aboard, dripping, with big grins. "It's so blue!" The hull is pretty clean. Propeller looks good. No sharks visible.

Jumping into the deep blue Pacific ocean.  Halfway between Cabo and Hilo.  Just how deep is it?

And we are off again, running 1500 RPM and making 5.0 knots, hoping to find some wind in our future.

20 hours later we finally find wind and are now bowling along at 6 knots under sail. Having motored quite a bit recently and by recording hours run and gallons used we know that Traveler uses only 1/2 gallon of diesel per hour at 1500 RPM and about 5 knots. For a 43 horsepower Kubota engine pushing a 27,000 pound boat that's not bad.

Scott, Connie, and Scott

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