The Vast Pacific
Rich's 2025 World ARC PatBon Blog
Richard Hurd
Mon 17 Mar 2025 14:08
We race on under bright moonlight and the stars above, our sails glowing eerily in the half light of night. The waves rolling under our 60’ yacht, effortlessly picking her up as if she was a cork bobbing on a pond. The mighty ocean stretches all about, no other boats or human life visible by the eye, nor by all our high-tech gadgetry we have on board. We know the World ARC fleet are around but they’re seemingly hiding from us on the other side of the horizon.
So we are left with the moon, the stars, the waves and the occasional storm petrol bird that swoops by, always on the wing to keep us company. The four of us in our tiny floating home, bouncing and rolling our way towards the Marquesas. We are soon to pass the 1,000NM left to go milestone, which means maybe 6 more days of sailing if the wind remains kind to us. For those of you following our GPS tracker, we made an early decision to get down to about 13 degrees south, as that is where the steady trade winds seemed to be. Having got to this latitude, the winds indeed have been the fairly steady E and SE trades we’ve sought. So we’ve now changed our sail plan to allow us to run due west before these winds that sweep us onwards.
We’ve had regular squalls, those wee little Tasmanian Devils of mini storms. You can see them approaching on radar at night and by eye in the day. Many have a magnetic like pull towards us! We turn to port, then to starboard and the wretches just seem to hunt us down! Once in their grasp they dump a huge amount of rain on top of us and the winds whip up with direction changes like a manic spaniel in the park. After 5 or 10 minutes it’s either off to find a new victim to torment, or it just dissipates into thin air - its life purpose fulfilled.
Inevitably, with four people on board in a small confined yacht, there have been some frustrations and tensions. It’s never easy as you can’t just pop outside for a breather and some timeout. The yacht continues to provide us challenges to overcome - chafe on the ropes and sails, rig issues, electrics all present problems and headaches. Habits and behaviours of others can get on one’s nerves, but this is all part of the challenge to safely sail to places rarely visited. When one’s feeling a bit low or frustrated, the thought of some new exotic lands soon to be reached lifts the spirits and reminds me why I’m doing this! The fun bit starts soon, researching what there is to do and see in these new set of islands we have the fortune to visit.
Rich Out.