May 3, 2016
Position: 33 17.37 S, 174 35.37 E
May 3, 2016
We’re off! And we’re bashing through the Tasman once again. We fought our way to windward getting down here, and now we are fighting our way back into the Tropics. Privateer is clipping along at 5.5 knots with 22 knots of breeze over the starboard bow. Although this trip is much drier (relatively) than the last, as I have recently renewed the caulk seal under the bowsprit—the culprit of a previous nasty leak! Yesterday I was too preoccupied to write a log. I spent the day fiddling with this and that aboard Privateer as we motored out into a glassy ocean. It always takes a day or three to settle into the rhythms of the watch and being at sea again. Taz adds a new dimension to our watch-keeping duties as well. Basically, we break it down like this: Kelsey’s job is to maintain 24-hr safety of Taz, and my job is maintain 24-hr safety of Privateer. And we all look out for the safety of each other. We are currently at latitude 32 degrees and can already feel a noticeable rise in ocean and air temps. Once we reach the Vanuatu latitudes the seawater is predicted to be a whopping 88 degrees F! We’re on a beat right now, which is not ideal, but we are able to lay a course right down the rhumb line (shortest distance between two points on a sphere). Our strategy is to sail north as fast as possible to get away from the incessant fronts and lows that are sweeping the NZ latitudes, and hopefully into some light trade winds. We are flying a double-reefed main, storm trysail, and single-reefed yankee sail. The Monitor wind vane, as always, is doing her superb job at allowing us to do better and more important things than sitting in the cockpit, amidst torrents and waterfalls of seawater! The ocean is a deep electric-purple color. We’re heeled at about 20 degrees which makes for difficult typing… Taz is getting a good lesson about gravity! He’s doing a great job muscling himself around and practicing one hand for the ship, one hand for himself. Yesterday as we were leaving the Bay of Islands and heading out to sea, Taz got seasick for about 4 hours. We were running the engine and getting knocked around by some pretty uncomfortable swells—the same conditions that made him puke on the way up from Nelson in January. And he had eaten some mushrooms at breakfast, which seems to not be the best food when about to put to sea. Still, we were pretty distressed. We came very close to turning the boat around and re-evaluating our sailing plans! We gave him some Pedialyte which he loved—never tasted anything sweet like that before!—and set a time limit on how far out to sea we’d go in case the sickness continued. Fortunately after 4 hours he stopped getting sick, and went back to his regular smiling self again. I’ve seen a lot of seasick people in my sailing career and it seems that Taz might be one of the people who get sick at the outset of the voyage for a few hours, and then are totally fine. Kelsey and I hadn’t even imagined that Taz could get seasick, because neither of us do. The gods are laughing! Poor guy… Well, it’s good to have him back again, and he seems pretty pleased with himself now.
