First Pacific Catch!

Date: 19th April, 2024

Where am I? 

Latitude: 06°08.8 S

Longitude: 099°12.3 W

Under sail, around 700 nautical miles from Galapagos and heading 260° towards landfall at Hiva Oa.

How is the weather?

Winds from the south east from 8 to 17 knots, max gusts 22 knots (on Wednesday). Mostly sunny with a few scattered clouds. Cold rain on Tuesday night which was miserable when on night watch, but none since then. Sea state is mild with a few white caps and waves ranging between 1 and 3 metres.

What am I feeling?

I’m starting to settle into the routine of passage making: adjusting to the watch system, remembering to store up rest when possible. Our crew is working well together, making good use of our different areas of experience or expertise. On a long passage on a relatively small yacht, the most important thing is crew compatibility and thankfully we have that in spades!

What has happened this week?

The last couple of days in Galapagos were a bit of a rush for provisioning which, as one might expect, is not as simple as in Panama. The Proinsular Supermarket at Puerto Ayora is the largest in the islands and while they have a reasonable selection, fresh fruit and vegetables are in short supply and sourcing tonic water for our evening G&T was a bit of a palaver, at a cost of $2 per (small) can! 

The ladies decamped to a nearby hotel in Puerto Ayora on Sunday so that our departure on Monday would be free of packing, moving duffle bags, etc and we had a last team dinner at The Point Restaurant, which was very nice – a fine view over the water and friendly service. After dinner, we bade our final farewells and the gentlemen retired to the yacht via water taxi, leaving the ladies to enjoy a night’s sleep without lee cloths and the incessant movement of a rocky anchorage. We shall miss the comfort of their feminine touch in the days ahead. That old saw: “absence makes the heart grow fonder” does have an element of truth attached to it! Hasta luego!

For the clearing out process, I needed to go to the Immigration office in Puerto Ayora to have the passports stamped and then return to Fujin to await an inspection aboard by Customs, the Harbour Master and a Park Official. They were looking for narcotics, safety equipment and penguins & giant tortoises respectively…. All of this was accomplished in pretty good time and we pulled up anchor at 1000, driving past the ladies’ hotel for a final wave.

The conventional approach to the trip from Galapagos to Marquesas is to sail on a course of 210° to 220° for one or two days, usually under engine, to find the south east trade winds at between 4° and 5° south latitude and 094° and 095° west longitude. We followed this strategy and, after a mixture of sailing and motor sailing, we hit the trades at around 0400 on Wednesday, meaning that it took 42 hours or so. We then came onto a course of 261°, pointing to our waypoint 50 miles short of Hiva Oa.

We expect the winds to back today such that we will need to put up our downwind rig in order to maintain our course – we will do that this afternoon when everyone is up and about. As I write this at 0930 on Friday, I am on watch, Patrick and Ian are asleep and Per is catching up on some correspondence down below.

We’ve had some challenges to deal with this first few days. 

First dealing with a badly furled gennaker which we had to take down below and untangle – no easy task given the sheer volume of taffeta-like material. 

Second, sorting out what we believe to be a faulty Racor fuel/water separator alarm in the middle of the night. The system is supposed to alert if it detects water in the fuel entering the separator which is designed to prevent contaminated fuel from reaching the engine. While it did not appear that water was in fact collecting in the separator, I drained it, refilled it with clean diesel but the alarm continued to sound. To fix that, I had to disconnect the alarm in the engine room – not so easy to find at 0300 on a rocky Wednesday night. I’ve reconnected the alarm now and it’s not going off so it seems it might have been triggered due to something getting wet from the rain. In any case, we will keep a close watch on the separators to make sure we are OK there.

Thirdly, we’ve had problems with the furling mechanism on our large genoa sail – this allows us to take sail in or out via an electric motor controlled from the cockpit. The control buttons were not resulting in any movement to the furler. At first, we thought we had wrapped the gennaker halyard around the top swivel, causing it to jam. Rather than send someone up the mast in unsafe conditions, we decided to drop the halyard and see if that would work. We did, and it didn’t… 

Ian eventually tracked the problem down to a malfunctioning breaker switch on the furler control box which is located under the forward berth. If the breaker is tripped due to an overload, one has to press the reset button to reset it but the reset button is not working. Some duct tape and some pieces of plastic from a Gatorade powder spoon solved that problem and we now have the genoa further working normally! I will have to see if I can source a spare part to be delivered to Tahiti.

And I almost forgot to mention our first Pacific catch! Just before 1800 on Wednesday, one of our fishing lines started to zing out at quite a rate and the upshot was Patrick landed a very nice skipjack tuna of around 10  or 12 kg. We had some for sushi that evening and some seared tuna for dinner on Thursday – quite delicious. The rest is in the freezer for another meal and our Shimano rods are taking a break for a couple of days!

We’ve now got some 2,300 miles to go to our anchorage.

Fujin out!