agility @ sea

Today is the second day of a crossing and a kind of surreal day. Before I jump into that, thanks for the comments. It’s motivating for me to know some friends out there value the blog. Also, know that I can’t comment back since I’m using a satellite phone to email the blog posts.

Besides the normal sailing, weather routing, and navigation stuff in my head I’ve been trying to make sense of a horrific murder/suicide (by shotgun) that we discovered from a friend’s facebook page a couple of days ago. Jerri and I had met this couple on a 10 day river barge trip down the Danube two years ago. It was one of those special times in life when you meet someone, connect as friends, and spend nearly every moment together, laughing nearly the entire time, for 10 days. In many ways, I think we may have jumped ship if we hadn’t have met them – they were the highlight of the trip for us. I can’t get them out of my head. A disturbing, relevant memory is how appalled they were that Agility would not have a gun on board.
Barbara, “We are gun people and I’d never be on a boat without a gun.” Mike, screaming across the boat lounge filled with people, “Tim, Tim, did you see the dow hit 18,000!” To this day we sometimes yell “Tim” in Mike’s tone of voice and crack up. Rest in Peace Barbara.

Add to this, a family member was recently diagnosed with Melanoma and scheduled for a lymph node biopsy on Wed. At these times I’m glad to have developed a strong compartmentalization capability even though it doesn’t always serve me well.

All my brain can piece together is to contrast the immensity of the ocean and the fragility of our human existence making me once again appreciate family and friends.

Back to sailing. We’ve been motoring since the last log entry and we’ve altered course a bit to pass closer to Cape Verde Islands. We’ll stay over 200 miles west of the Saharan coast where pirates have boarded boats. The attack last year was 30 miles off shore. Don’t worry, 150 is considered safe from the authorities.

The forecast is for the winds to fill in on Fri, Dec 1 a day or two from Cape Verde. We’ve been running just one engine at 2,500 rpms and we burn a little less than 1 gal per hour. We have 200 gallons in the main tanks and 25 gallon in gas cans so a total of 225 that we can burn with a spare 5 gallons in another tank if we run dry and we need to get into a port after sailing there. Our range in calm weather is about 1,300 miles assuming we can make 5.5 knots and don’t get any help or hinderance from wind and waves. Since we have twice that to Barbados, we need to sail and when motoring we need to do that at an efficient speed.

Right now, I think the wind will fill in and we won’t need to make a stop for fuel, but we’re Agile and we’ll decide after we get more data and the forecasts become more firm. Worst case, if we don’t stop for more fuel, we’ll sit in the middle of the ocean becalmed just like Christopher Columbus for a day or two.

While grilling steaks out back tonight we caught a Mahi-Mahi. I landed it and put a noose around it’s tail to drag it backwards which is supposed to kill it without the mess of blood everywhere. The steaks were done so I needed to get the fish in. Long story short, I gutted the fish and had it ready to hang off the back and drain but the tail slipped though the knot and it dropped into the deep blue. Shit.

One last thing, the bioluminescence in this part of the ocean is amazing. First of all, the water is warmer here than we’ve seen in a long time, 77 degrees so perhaps that has something to do with it. When looking off the back of the boat and at the waves on the sides, the water is filled with a glowing bio mass. It looks a little like the glow worms in New Zealand, but the most similar sight I can think of is the Avatar movie where the tree of life has vines that are luminescent. Anyway, always something cool to see on the water if you’re looking.