Flinging Birds

It feels like it just keeps getting colder. I'm wearing my OR hoodie and my Primaloft jacket with my foul weather bibs below deck and add my heavy sailing jacket and foul weather jacket top side. I'm warm, but only just.

I did fuel math today (5/1 @ 16:00) . Fuel remaining by counting engine hours: 21 gallons. Fuel remaining by gauge: 35 gallons. 188 miles to refuel.
Engine rpm options:
2000 rpm: 20 gallons needed, 3 am arrival at fuel dock.
1800 rpm: 18 gallons needed, 6 am arrival at fuel dock.
1600 rpm: 15 gallons needed, 11 am arrival at fuel dock

We set the rpm to 1700. The burn rates are guess work. We really have no idea if we're going to run out of fuel or not. No wind in sight. We have food for a week if it's needed to wait for wind.

Danny tells a story from his watch last night of small birds being harassed by big birds until they were forced to land on the deck or crash into the dodger. He'd scoop them up with the fishing net and fling them into the air where they flew away.

Genny, rip

Six knots of wind is hardly enough to fill the sails. They're protesting, asking to be let in. As long as the boat speed is higher than the motor alone will provide, I'll leave them out. It's becoming a contest of wills, like whining dogs. The problem is the wind is coming from directly astern. The main sail blankets the genoa, so the genoa feels left out. Hence the tantrum.

The wind/water generator is finally out of service for good. In the first half of this trip it provided electrical generation from the wind turbine. When that failed we changed out the wind turbine for a water turbine and pulled it along behind us for most of this half of the trip. Now the shaft to the water turbine has broken.

Offshore sailing is hard on gear. Wear and tear and exposure to the elements is relentless, so the parade of equipment needing maintenance is relentless. A guy really gets to know his boat on a trip like this.

Bruce Frank, we're thinking about you.

A Good Run

We're on the home stretch now: 270 miles at 5 knots takes us 54 hours to
the Strait of Juan de Fuca entrance. 5 knots is the speed we get motoring at an economical pace. And motoring is about what we can expect for the next 54 hours according to the weather forecast.

By my reckoning of engine hours, we have 3.5 days of fuel for the 2.25 days remaining. If we believe the fuel gauge, we have 4.5 days of fuel. I've been fairly conservative, so the gauge is probably right. I guess we'll know when we refuel.

The plan is to refuel in Seku, just the other side of Neah Bay. From there it's another 28 hours to Shilshole. I anticipate arriving at Shilshole on Tuesday some time in the afternoon, give or take. Sorry if that's too fuzzy to schedule a marching band for our arrival.

If we arrive late Quijote and I will spend the night in a transient slip at Shilshole. Otherwise we will head through the locks. If anyone following our progress would be interested in joining us for a ride through the locks to Lake Union you can contact me at: rgmercer@myiridium.net

The storm that blew through yesterday carried us for a good run. The wind was a little stronger than forecasted, but the seas were not as bigs they were in the first leg when we had similar wind. It lasted pretty much all day and then quieted down overnight. When another watch started the engine, we knew it was done.

Having implied that the weather won't be helping us much for the rest of this trip, the wind has decided to kick it up a notch just to prove me wrong. What a lovely surprise: a quiet sunset on gentle water. It's so nice to be able to shut the engine off for a few hours. Let's see how long it lasts.

Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting has come along way in recent years. Forecasts are created using mathematical models that keep getting better with each generation of meteorologists. The forecasts predict what the weather conditions will be anywhere in the world and are offered free to download as a grid for an area of interest. Software tools make it easy to collect and evaluate that data.

Imagine what the ideal tool for a trip like this would look like. It would be an app on your iPad or phone that displays a map of the Pacific Ocean and creates an ideal path through the weather. We don't want to navigate through weather that's too stormy or too calm. We want wind at an angle, not on the bow or the stern. We want the tool to have offshore access to the weather data it needs.

That's essentially what we have. If we tell the app the coordinates of the area of interest, it will download by satellite a grid of weather data over that area. If we provide start and stop points and the time of departure, it will calculate the optimum path through the weather that was downloaded.

As we advance the time in the app we can watch the weather evolve and see our boat icon follow its path through that weather. It's useful to see the wind speed and direction at every point on our path. With weather systems and boat moving independently, it helps establish exactly where we'll be with respect to a system as we proceed.

Of course the result is only as good as the forecast and the expected response of the boat. Keeping track of the boat's performance will help us fine tune it's parameters in the software. Updating the forecast periodically will give us an updated path and a sense of how chaotic or stable the forecasts are. Stable forecasts give us confidence that they're accurate forecasts.

This ability to download weather data at sea by satellite and use that data to create computer generated routes on an iPad wasn't available when I started the Quijote South Pacific Semi-circumnavigation effort. It's one of those areas that has evolved, forcing us to evolve along with it to keep up with the technology.

To give you a sense of how quickly the technology has improved, Quijote was built in 2007 and was originally fitted with an integrated weather fax for downloading weather forecasts and charts.

Fueling Quijote

It's another night, another watch. There should be less than a week remaining. Mark is talking about stopping for fuel in the Strait. I'm not convinced we'll need to, but that depends on how much we burn between here and there.

The fuel tank is still reading full, which means we haven't started using the lower tank yet. That's kind of curious because my calculations have us with 40 gallons remaining (multiplying burn rate by engine hours), but that lower tank is about 62 gallons as I understand it. So something's funny. It shouldn't be reading full. The gas gauge is wrong perhaps. Or maybe the burn rate is lower than I think it is. I'm more inclined to believe the latter as we have been very conservative with the engine RPM's.

The size of the disparity has me anxious though. I don't want to run out of gas with a meter telling me I have a full tank. I guess that's why we keep track of burn rates and engine hours. At some point I have to stop believing the gauge. I'm not quite there yet.

The Doldrums

The boat is restless. The crew is anxious. The swell is obnoxious. The sails are lifeless. The motoring seems endless. Thankfully this watch is not.

Just enough of a good thing

Tonight is a weird one. The sounds are all wrong. Maybe it's just the water. And the wind. I'm behind the dodger, so I can't speak for the feel, but the wind has more of a quiet moan to it than its usual pitched wind in the rigging sound.

The water too is different. It's more subdued than it usually is. Gone is the charging river, playful water gig. Waves roll by the boat and rustle like dry leaves in autumn.

I can tell you now what the difference is. We've spent many days beating into the wind. Tonight is the first in a long time that I've come on watch to find the wind coming from behind us. The wind and the waves are working with us rather than against us. It's a nice change, even if it doesn't last long.

Low pressure systems are parading across the north Pacific above us. Wind rotates around them in a counter clockwise direction. the low to our northwest delivers wind from the south. We're glad to have it. As long as we don't get too much of a good thing.