09:15S 110:56W

24 hour run 175nm

 

Sailing across the Pacific in the 60s, 70s and 80s (and much earlier too of course) must have been incredibly challenging.  How we admire all those amazingly brave and adventurous sailors we spent our youth reading about – the Hiscocks, Robin Lee-Graham, the Roths, David Lewis etc.  When we use our up to date chart plotter, laptop and ipad for navigation and satellite phone for calls and emailing it makes us realise how lucky we are and how difficult, challenging and lonely life must have been for those sailors back then.  Of course, they couldn’t look into the future so for them the sextant and paper charts were all they knew for navigation. For communication the odd one perhaps had primitive HF radio.  Today we think absolutely nothing of the modern technology we have.  A few hours ago we had a chat with an Australian boat 15 miles away on VHF – yesterday’s sailors wouldn’t have even known there was another boat in the vicinity!

 

We love our satellite phone (a present from David’s mum) as sending and receiving emails and updating the blog is the highlight of our day – our one chance to really connect with friends and family at home, get snippets of news about the outside world and let everyone know how we are faring out here on the briny.  We pour over the emails, read every one word for word several times and try to reply to them all.  They really brighten up our day enormously especially when conditions aren’t great – it’s nice to know people are thinking of us.

 

We can also download weather grib files via the satellite phone although can’t go as far as accessing the internet although that day probably won’t be too far away.  We actually find it quite liberating to be away from the internet although imagine we’ll be updating our Facebook status once back in range!

 

The worst part of being able to communicate daily is that if we don’t post a blog for some reason then people worry.  There can be glitches in the system for any number of reasons and so we tell people “don’t panic”.   Our laptop or satellite phone could die, we could have a systems failure or any one of a number of things could prevent us updating the blog.  This is where the SSB radio is invaluable as was proved recently.  Fellow cruisers sailing to the Marquesas ahead of us, who don’t have an SSB, suddenly stopped sending emails and couldn’t be reached on their satellite phone. Worried relatives back in Australia got in touch with other cruisers and a message went out on our SSB net for yachts in the area to try and reach them on VHF which eventually worked.  Their satellite phone had died leaving them without any means of contact apart from VHF which has a range of about 20 miles. 

 

Our weather continues to frustrate.   We had a wonderful afternoon yesterday and actually managed to walk around the boat without maintaining a vice like grip as we went. Preparing dinner became a pleasure rather than a chore (tuna cerviche followed by seared tuna on mash with sauteed peppers and tomatoes).   But by midnight that wind had got up again in its usual diurnal pattern and we were lurching and rolling making sleep once again fitful.  As I write this it’s settled a bit and it’s beautifully sunny – maybe I will even put a load of washing on.