Notes on a North Pacific Passage

There is no single word to describe this passage, but if I had to choose one, it would simply be: Hard. It is the only word that encompasses the mental and physical demands required and the need for flexibility, creativity, endurance, and endless tolerance for boredom and monotony. It was a marathon, not a sprint, requiring the same mental toughness, training, pacing, coping, and perseverance demanded of any long distance athlete.

Though I can only provide snippets and snapshots and very unpolished descriptions of our days, I hope this account of our passage paints a picture of our joys and challenges and of the overall experience. I think there is something in it for fellow-sailors and landlubbers alike. And while I hope I have captured the range of our human experience, Tom and I want recognize the unsung heroes of this journey:

• Crazy Ivan, our tireless autopilot, worked 24-7 to keep us on course and help us navigate through the steep and irregular waves. Autopilots regularly break on passages like this; neighbors of ours here ended up having to hand steer for eight days swapping one-hour watches, which incited a level of exhaustion that we can’t begin to imagine.
• Korvessa, our stout and sturdy boat that was made for passages like this, did not let us down. We never felt unsafe, we had a comfortable pilothouse to weather the winds and chills in, and with four sails, in-boom furling, and an electric winch, we had a full range of sail combinations at our disposal.
• Our engine and generator proved to be two reliable workhorses that we could not have lived without on this journey. The engine kept us moving forward in light winds, more stable in heavy winds, and secure in the knowledge that we had the power to make it to land. The generator’s role in keeping the batteries charged was indispensable, especially since we didn’t have a functioning alternator…. And the solar panels were minimally functional, as the skies were foggy and gray for the second half of the trip.

This passage was an exercise in teamwork. We commend and are awed by the single-handers who do this alone. But we don’t have a full understanding of how they do it. For us, we had to rely on each other. We had to trust that we were each going to do our parts and that we would ask for help if we needed it. We had to check each other as we changed shifts and as our fatigued brains and judgment eroded. And in the spirit of sharing and teamwork, we want to share a raw picture of the 18 days we just spent at sea. Revel in the peaks and wince at the troughs along the way, just as we did. Enjoy the journey.

Day 1: Yay, we’re off the dock! Six hours later: I’m going to lose my dinner. Yup, there it goes.

Day 2: Still sick, but I must stand my watch. Oh my God, I shouldn’t have eaten breakfast. Yup, there it goes. Note to self: puke over the leeward side of the boat next time. We chose this time to leave because of the good easterly wind it would give us to help us sail north, but the waves it has kicked up are close and steep, and the wind being slightly more northeasterly than expected means that we are sailing a close reach into 22 knots of wind. No wonder I’m sick.

Day 3: Feeling slightly better as long as I stay outside and stare at the horizon. On the plus side, it means standing watch is not a problem. Going down to use the head, however, is. I really wish I could pee over the side of the boat like Tom.

A boobie landed on Tinker, our bright red dinghy hanging off the back of our boat. He has a beautiful blue-gray beak, yellow eyes, and gorgeous, mottled, brown and white feathers. His feet are green-ish, as his light yellow skin forms a film on top of his blue legs and toes. He seems to be settling in for a ride. Tom has named him Alfred.

Day 4: Alfred spends his day preening, napping, and examining us. Tom spends his day bringing me food and drink because I am still too scared to go down below to do anything but pee and sleep. Speaking of pee, using one of her stronger forms of communication, Demon has clearly peed on the bedding in the aft cabin again. It reeks. She spends the rest of her day making herself look as miserable as possible and shedding all over our clothes.

Day 5: It’s still hot. We thought it was going to get cooler sooner than this. But at least nights are comfortable. I spend my whole night watch in the cockpit, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, sometimes lying down on the thermarest and letting my eyes close ever so briefly. I listen to audio books, scan the horizon, and take in the simplistic beauty of it all. The moon is waning, but is still almost full and bright as day. I can almost read by it.

Tom and I tried 5-hour shifts, but that didn’t give either of us enough sleep, so we’ve settled in at 6-hour night watches – Tom from 8pm to 2am and me from 2am to 8am – which seems to be working well enough. We then swap naps all day. I send Rick (our weather router) our position and weather info at 7am, we snack and have happy hour at 4:30pm, Tom checks in with the Pacific Seafarers HAM radio net at 5pm, we have dinner around 6pm, Tom rests a little, then I crawl into bed at 8pm. Since we’re still on a starboard tack, our go-to bed right now is the single berth in the sauna. With the lee-cloth up, it makes a cozy and safe place to try to settle in and catch whatever dreams and rest we can.

Alfred left us this morning. We miss him. We don’t have a lot of company out here.

Day 6: We took advantage of the calmer waters today to spend hours fixing the reef in the mizzen sail (the sail on the mast at the back of the boat). Only a few hours out of Honolulu on Day 1, we went to put up the mizzen with the second reef in, but the line slipped completely through the sail and the boom. Since shoving a thick rope back down an 8-foot boom is no easy task, we had to tackle some major surgery. Tom took apart both ends of the boom, then we experimented with different ways to pull the rope back through the inside of the boom. In the end, we were able to take some stiff electrical wire and force it through the boom, then tape the rope onto the wire and pull it back through. After that, Tom reassembled both ends of the boom. We raised the mizzen sail back up, happy in the knowledge that we were now better prepared for the strong winds headed our way. Or rather, that we were headed towards.

Day 7: It is finally getting cooler. I actually had to wear my foulies (foul weather gear) in the cockpit last night to stay warm. The water temperature has dropped significantly, too. It’s down 6 degrees in less than 24 hours – from 80 to 74. Demon is eating and drinking again but is still very unhappy with this state of affairs.

Day 8: The sea is so flat. I had no idea the ocean could ever be so flat and glassy. It turns out that the Pacific actually can be pacific at times.

The cable to the Pactor modem that allows us to get weather files and emails just died. Damn. Thank God for Rick’s frighteningly accurate weather forecasts and routing. Even more essential now than before.

Day 9: Tom taught me a new word today: piloerection. No, it’s not what you think. It’s the mechanism that causes your hairs to stand on end when you get cold. So, Tom is now standing out in the cockpit in his underwear, arms out in his best Kate Winslet Titanic impression, trying unsuccessfully to get a piloerection. He wants so badly to be cold.

Day 10 (aka The Midway Point, or The Most Up and Down Day Ever):
GOOD: Exactly half way there at 0715. 1120 nautical miles exactly to Ala Wai Harbor and Kodiak Harbor. A raft of 40 albatrosses helps me celebrate as I poke my head out the hatch. For once, there is something other than water to see. You can’t let yourself think too much about how far you are from anywhere. From other people, from help. You just have to keep moving.
BAD: The generator automatically shut off from over heating. This is very bad because Tom wasn’t able to get the alternator on the engine to work before we left, and we have been counting on the generator to keep our batteries charged. He immediately shut off our fridge, freezer, and radar in hopes that the solar panels could keep up with the remaining electrical needs. We planned out how we were going to eat up the remainder of the food in the freezer.
GOOD: After some exploring, Tom discovered an air bubble in the generator’s sea water cooling intake line. After bleeding it out, the generator was up and running as normal again. Whew. Fridge, freezer, and radar back on!
BAD: I am feeling sick again.
ALSO BAD: Due to our low battery power our fuel gauges weren’t working properly, and Tom accidentally transferred too much fuel into the starboard tank, the extra of which was pumped overboard by the engine. Damn.
GOOD: We still have plenty of fuel if we need to use it.
GOOD: Tom saw a whale! He identified it as either a Sei whale or a Minke whale. No doubt our budding cetologist Andy would have been able to figure out which one it was.
BAD: Said whale cut across our course right in front of us, almost giving Tom a heart attack. He was still amped up on adrenaline at 2:00 am when we changed shifts.

Day 11: In celebration of the generator working, Tom turned on the water heater and we each got the fastest shower of our lives. Though we have plenty of water left, we still need to make sure it lasts us at least another week. The Gulf of Alaska is no place to have to pause to pull out the water maker for a few hours. We’re slowing down a little and heading east to let a low system pass to the north of us.

Day 12 (aka The Day the Shit Hit the Fan):
I guess we didn’t go slowly enough. We’re definitely catching the edge of this system even if we’ve avoided the worst of it. The wind has picked up to a sustained 27-31 knots with gusts up to 35. Gale force. Crests are blown off the tops of waves, and the slate gray ocean is now covered in a whitecap frosting. Twelve-foot walls of dark water approach us, rising well above the cabin-top, lift us, and let us slide down. But every few minutes a cresting wave misses the rhythm and slams the hull with a loud bang, forcing the mast hard over. Korvessa, sturdy cork that she is, bounces right back up. We, on the other hand, are not so buoyant. We pour hot water into dehydrated meals and brace ourselves as we dutifully eat. I crawl gratefully into bed – which is now a nest of cushions in the v-berth since we’re now on a port tack and heeling the other direction – but I don’t sleep well as the boat yaws and pitches through the near-gale conditions all night.

I officially miss the kids. I keep having images of just hugging them and cuddling them in my lap.

Day 13: We are clearly now in the middle of a tanker and cargo highway. We have seen five or six ships a day for the last two days, a few of whom we have had to call to make passing arrangements. It amazes me that in an ocean this big, we can still end up on a collision course. The wind has calmed to 15 knots, but the sea state is still big and uncomfortable. The helmsman of the cargo ship MSC Lauren, which is passing us astern, calls us to ask how we’re doing. “All is well,” Tom says “though yesterday was rather uncomfortable.” I imagine the helmsman nodding. “You’re very brave to engage with the North Pacific in your boat in these conditions,” he says. Brave indeed, and maybe a tiny bit crazy.

I am so ready for this to be over.

Day 14: Tom made a note in the log that there is a “black evil cloud wall of death” approaching from the west. Great.

Today Tinker (our dinghy) tried to escape. Generally on a passage, people stow their dinghies on deck rather than on davits at the back so they don’t get swamped in case the boat takes a large wave over the stern. But being a 40-foot-deck cutter-rigged ketch (two headsails and two masts), we don’t have room on our deck for our dinghy; instead, we secured him vertically from the davits up against the Korvessa’s transom so that he couldn’t get swamped. Tom looked back at one point to see Tinker hanging precariously from only one of the davits. Eek. We figured out quickly (and luckily) that it was only the the shackle holding the block and line onto the davits that had broken, meaning all we had to do was retrieve the block and tackle with a boat hook and snap it back onto the davits with a new shackle. The tricky part is that this requires leaning quite far over the stern of the boat to reach the far end of the davit. Tom and I both clipped in with our tethers (out in the ocean, if you fall overboard in these conditions and in these cold waters, you’re unlikely to be recovered). I held a firm grip on the back on Tom’s life jacket while he reached precariously over the boat and used both hands to get the shackle back in place. Bad Tinker. Stay.

Day 15: Tom and I swap notes in the ship’s log because we don’t necessarily trust ourselves to convey all important information at shift change. We are now booking it north to our next waypoint so that we can outrun the next low system that is supposed to pass to the south of us. Gale dodge. Fun stuff.

It was 53.9 F in the pilothouse when I came on shift. Brr. On the plus side, there are actually stars out tonight! We haven’t seen those in a few days.

Day 16: I have forgotten what it feels like not to be tired. I have never known fatigue that is so bone-deep, soul-deep. And I’m the parent of two kids, so I do have some experience with deep fatigue.

I played dodge-squall all morning. And then when one just formed on top of us and spit out a mediocre amount of rain without the expected winds gusts and downdrafts, I decided it wasn’t really necessary to dodge them. I did, however, learn how to better tune the radar so that rain doesn’t look like land and waves don’t look like a small army of ships. A helpful new skill to learn.

Day 17: The Gulf of Alaska is known for its fierce storms, but not today. Today it is calm and gentle. And I am grateful for that.

Day 18: It did not get fully dark last night. I came up at 2:00 am for my watch to encounter a giddy Tom, who was like a child who got to stay up all night. He was so excited to report that the light never left the sky, a light just strong enough to navigate by and to kick in the adrenaline we would need to get through our last day of the passage. The light is especially important, by the way, because we are now on log-watch. We’re back in Pacific Northwest coastal waters, which means propeller-eating logs could appear without warning anytime.

The hours between spotting land and arriving in Kodiak were among the longest of the whole trip. Due to fatigue and poor brain functioning, we ended up running air into the fuel lines and had to bleed the engine this morning, a thankless task for an already bruised and exhausted captain. But once Tom got the air bubbles out, we motorsailed the agonizingly slow last miles. Turning into Chiniak Harbor, we were greeted by a humpback whale that spouted mere meters from the boat! But as we navigated through the rocky islets of the bay, we spotted an unmarked rock that was not on any of our charts. As we watched breakers wash over this outcropping, it took both our tired brains to figure out what we were looking at. Safely past the rock and wide-eyed as we carefully followed each navigational marker through the labyrinth of shoals, we made our turn into Kodiak Harbor. And there awaiting us was a happily-snacking, fuzzy sea otter. A good omen, we decided.

Our final turn into the marina brought on a wave of pleasure for all the senses. A fluorescent green hill towered above the marina. Cobalt blue fishing boats, pink fenders, yellow-buoyed fishing nets, and pink and purple houses flooded our eyes. The smell of fish and salt filled our nostrils. A light drizzle began to tickle our skin and wet our faces and oily hair. Eagles and seagulls cackled above as the boat slowly rumbled into the slip. Smiling faces of friends made in Honolulu waved to us from the dock. The experience was only dampened by a unfortunate miscommunication, which perhaps only the boaters here will appreciate fully. We had been told by the security guard to prepare for port tie, only to see at the last minute that it was, in fact, a starboard-tie, which meant that Tom, exhausted and brain fogged, had to turn the boat around and reverse, in a direction counter to our normal prop-walk, into the awaiting slip. In my blurred judgement, I stepped onto the slippery wooden dock too soon, spilling myself all over the wet wood, but managing to hold on to two of our docking lines, one of which our friend Helen gracefully took from me. Our blue-water experienced friends offered helping hands and no judgement on our fatigued docking blunders. And as fellow passage makers, they offered words that we were so happy to hear: “Welcome to Kodiak. We’ll see you tomorrow,” knowing that we were too exhausted for more interaction at that moment. We turned the engine off. And there was silence. And stillness. Beautiful stillness.