Heading for Polynesia

Bamboozle
Jamie and Lucy Telfer
Mon 19 Apr 2010 16:26
02:20.940S 094:57.736W

Just a quick post to say we have we have set off on this year's big crossing
from Galapagos towards the Marquesas (the easternmost islands of French
Polynesia). It is almost exactly 3000 nautical miles of big empty blue
between here and there and all we hope to find in between are the steady
south-east trade winds. It took us nineteen and a half days on Savoir Vivre,
a time we would clearly like to beat but we are aiming at twenty and hoping
for better. Generally it has been a year of quite light conditions out here
and it is far too far to motor so, if we don't have any wind, we won't be
going anywhere quickly. We have however had a cracking first 36 hours
picking up some decent breeze as soon as we left Villamil and have now got
our Amel downwind system of twin poled-out headsails set which is pushing us
along very comfortably making 8.5 knots with the benefit of a bit of
positive current.

It takes a few days to settle back into the routine of passages. Whilst the
autopilot does nearly all of the steering, one of us is always on watch to
keep an eye on the boat and sails, and to look out for ships, yachts, whales
or anything else we might run into. It is actually sometimes quite hard to
keep remembering how important this lookout is, as we may go days or even
weeks without actually seeing anything except the horizon of our ring of
blue water. We both now use little vibrating countdown alarms to help us to
stay alert (without disturbing the person off watch). At night (and only
when things are quiet and calm) we use a six hour watch system which is a
long time to stay awake but does mean that when you are off watch you get a
decent period of undisturbed sleep. It basically means that I don't go to
bed until 2am and then Lucy has to get up very very early. The other
advantage of this is that, with it getting light at around 5am, Lucy really
only has 3 hours of true darkness before the sun arrives to brighten things
up. During the day we take it in turns to rest and catch up on any missing
hours of sleep and, despite what people sometimes seem to think, we do get
to see a bit of each other. There are normally a few little maintenance jobs
to do along with keeping up the log, the navigation and of course, plotting
our slow progress across a giant chart but there is still plenty of time for
reading, music, crosswords and thinking......we do seem to do a lot of
thinking whilst the hours tick away!