Sail Cutthroat

27 April 2007
Lat N21.39
Lon W150.57

LFW²  - I’ll explain later

Less than 400 miles to go…but, right now, it seems like it’s going to take forever.  We’d been moving along smartly until late in the morning yesterday.  Then the winds slowed down during the afternoon and we’ve been motoring a good bit of the time and through some of the night.  Looks like the trade winds have deserted us…not sure we can motor all the way to Oahu from here given the current fuel situation.  Would love to get another 100 miles of sailing in first, then we can motor if we need to.  I know for sure that I don’t want to spend the next couple of days bobbing around in the doldrums.  We could have a mutiny on our hands!  It would be the captain and that’s not a good thing.

We saw a Hawaii bound cruise ship this afternoon.  Looks like she’s headed for the big island and not in any great hurry.  Probably slowing down to time her arrival tomorrow morning.
In spite of our wind situation, it was a great food day aboard Cutthroat.  After some heavy exercise with the genyker in the morning, Ed got creative in the galley and turned out some awesome omelets.  They were much appreciated and mighty tasty.  Roger and Elise followed that up late this afternoon with rib eye steaks, rotisserie potatoes and a large salad.  We accompanied that with a nice bottle of Chianti.  Not a bad eating day.  We still have plenty of lettuce which continues to amaze me.  Sam’s packaged romaine lettuce if kept in the refrigerator really lasts a long time.  We consumed the iceberg lettuce first, and have just finished the first package of the romaine.  We will go heavy on the salads until we arrive in Oahu (too bad we’re down to one tomato).  Those lasted a long time as well.  I wrapped them individually in newspaper and stored them in an open container all by themselves.  Buying them hard and not yet ripe certainly helped.  Since it is prohibited to bring in fresh meat, eggs, fruits or vegetables, we’re either consuming, cooking or hiding food (no, we wouldn’t do that).  There is still another tray of eggs aboard too.  In Mexico you can readily buy eggs that have never been refrigerated and therefore don’t need any refrigeration.  They store easily - haven’t broken one yet - and last a long time.

Let’s fast forward 24 hours - we’re now down to 240 miles.  The weather continues to be mild with the trade winds “light” as they say.  That’s code for there’s not much wind…not enough to move the beast.  With the wind dead on our stern, we motored until late morning and then hoisted the old genyker again.  It was actually perfect as we cruised along at 6.5 to 8.5 knots with just the genyker.  We even had the added benefit of sailing on our exact preferred course.  What a pleasure.

I’m feeling better about the fuel now that we got in a full day of sailing and are closing in on Oahu.  In fact, we should arrive in Ali Wai Harbor (vicinity Honolulu) by Sunday afternoon.  Hopefully the Hawaii Yacht Club or Waikiki Yacht Club will be able to provide a guest slip so we can get cleared through Customs.

Everyone seems to have their own personal vision of sailing the Pacific and especially sailing in the trade winds.  I’ve heard people say that sailing to Hawaii just requires heading west, putting out the sails, setting your wind vane or auto pilot and then go below and sleep.  Thirty days later you’ll wake up in Hawaii.  Well, we didn’t find that to be quite the case.  This trip provided a little bit of everything…no wind, light wind, heavy wind, squalls, rain, cloud cover, flat seas, high seas, and finally some sun and perfect weather.  But it was still a very benign trip - and that’s a good thing in my book.  We got our thrilling moments of adrenalin rush with green water streaming across the foredeck while trying to gather a sail in, as well as the long hours of relative peace and quiet.  Boredom never entered into the equation, however.  There is always something to do or something to check.

Back to LFW².  John and Roger came up with this - I think they were close to boredom - they should have been out checking or fixing something.

Long Friggin Way
Lots of Friggin Water

That pretty much captures the moment.

Next update will be from Honolulu after a few Mai-Tai’s.  Wonder how many of those we’ll be into before the Customs guys show up and clear us???  That is the next burning question.

Love to all,
Crew of the Cutthroat
Elise, Roger, John,  and Ed