Pacific Crossing

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I crossed the Pacific Ocean under sail: nearly 10,000nm/11,500mi/18,500km, six months shore to shore, 90 days underway, stopping in Panama, Ecuador (Galapagos), French Polynesia (Marquesas, Tuamotos and Society Islands), Niue, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu and Australia.  We entered the Pacific with a full moon on 31 January 2018 in Panama, and exited it with a near full moon on 26 July 2018 in Australia. That’s six new moons risen.

The Pacific Ocean is earth’s widest and deepest ocean; its surface area is bigger than all of the earth’s land combined. It’s the ocean where all of the salty old captains got their stripes; Magellan was the first, Captain Cook the most famous. And it’s the ocean people write songs and books about, the ocean sailors dream of crossing. I’m glad it was my first.

Last fall, it occurred to me that I wanted to cross an ocean:

 

“I want to cross an ocean. I want to be so far from land that I stop looking for it on the horizon. I want to be so disconnected from the world that I stop wondering who has liked my Facebook post and what new tragedy has waked our society and earth. I want to forget what day it is for so many days that I don’t know what month it is. I want time and space at sea to reflect on the last three years at anchor. I want to feel like we’re the only vessel in the sea, to feel like we’re big and powerful harnessing the wind to move, to feel like we’re small and vulnerable so far from rescue and so exposed to weather, to know that those very contradictory feelings are both very true, to walk that line between acknowledging the risks and surrendering to them. I want to cross an ocean for the same reason I wanted to cross the street as a young girl, the country as a teenager and the world as an adult. I want to cross an ocean because I can.”

Challenge Accepted.  Mission Accomplished.

 

 

All those miles and all that time, and landfall in Australia feels anticlimactic. Slocum set us up to believe that the Pacific Ocean was going to be not very “pacific” and very “vast”. My Pacific Crossing was pretty pacific, and didn’t feel all that vast. In part, save a dozen or so days of big seas, big winds, and squalls, we had a pretty easy crossing. The wind only blew over 25kts a handful of times, and the seas were mostly six feet or less. With the easterly trade winds behind us, and a predominantly westerly course, it was an easy broad reach; we did an awful lot of spinnaker runs and wing on wing legs. And in part, thanks to our rally, we were able to break up the miles manageably.  The longest leg was 3000nm and seventeen days at sea, and only two other legs were longer than 1000nm and a week at sea. Captain Ruud keeps saying, “We didn’t really do much. The wind just sort of brought us here.”

 

 

I had hoped that completing an ocean crossing would bring me a deeper understanding of what I’m doing out here at sea. It hasn’t. I read the seminal books about ocean crossings hoping they would imbue this crossing with a higher meaning. They haven’t. I reckon we feel a call of the sea and we answer it, nautical mile after nautical mile, until land calls again. It’s a basic human reaction to untraveled waters – sail them. I sailed across an ocean because it was there and I could.

 

 

 

 

Ten thousand nautical miles and six months later, I do feel better aligned, more balanced.  Following the sun and the moon around the earth one day at a time for six lunar cycles can realign your internal compass.  Ninety days of “yoga at a heel” can rebalance your mind and body.  I stand straighter, smile wider, laugh louder.

 

The journey is far from over.  There are two more oceans to cross, a circumnavigation to complete, more miles and days to figure out why I am so much happier out of the sight of land and off the grid, and what to do about it. I will listen to the rush of the water against the hull and the hum of the wind in the rig for a few more miles, and see what it tells me. I promise when we get back to the Caribbean I won’t feel that sailing from the Caribbean back to the Caribbean is “like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere” (Bernard Moitessier), and I’ll be ready to “coil up [my] ropes on land” (Joshua Slocum).  With a view of the sea.

 

Here are a few favorite photos and videos from the Pacific:

(NB: I give up on formatting all this….  I may add some more over the next few days…. This is way above my pay grade.)

Videos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Captains and Crew on Amara and Blue Pearl

Sun Sets

Sail Ho!

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Beautiful Places

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Landlubbers

Under the Sea