I remember a trip years ago where I was flying to somewhere in Asia. My job at the time occasionally sent me in that direction. Near the beginning of this particular flight the captain came on the speaker and described the route we would be taking. When he got to the part where he talked about the expected weather along the way he said, “Well, on a trip of this length we would expect to fly over several different weather systems.” That trip was more than twenty years ago. I don’t remember the exact destination but I still remember the announcement. In fact, it entered my thoughts several times during our 35 day, 2,500 mile passage between the islands of Upolu, Samoa and Oahu, Hawaii. “On a trip of this length.”
At thirty-five days, this was the longest non-stop passage we’ve done yet, but not the farthest in distance. Mexico to Nuku Hiva was probably a few hundred miles farther but also a few days shorter. That passage was downwind. This passage was more upwind. The prevailing wind, especially north of the equator, being generally from the northeast, and the direction of Oahu from Upolu being to the northeast, meant that for the entire trip we had to sail pointing as high into the wind as the boat was capable, while still maintaining an adequate speed. The entire trip was a battle to stay as close to the rhumb line between Apia Harbor and Ko Olina Marina as we could. But still, it somehow always seemed to be just out of reach to the east. Even so, this passage had many days of some of the nicest, most enjoyable, relaxed and lazy sailing I think I’ve ever experienced. Just the two of us, utterly alone in our own private bubble, moving quietly and smoothly across the face of the earth.
As a kid sailing with my dad on Sunday afternoons on the lake, he used to always remind me to “Head up in the puffs,” and, “Fall off before you luff.” That advice was never more true as on this passage. It was easiest and fastest to sail off the wind a little, going north, but that wasn’t taking us where we needed to go. We needed to take advantage of every opportunity the wind provided to keep moving east, keeping the distance between us and the rhumb line as short as possible, or we might end up too far west of Hawaii. We had already clawed our way directly upwind between Fiji and Samoa and didn’t want to do it again as we neared Hawaii. With much patience and determination, Julie experimented with the sails and a locked-down, fixed rudder angle slightly off the wind until finally achieving a balance where the boat pretty much sailed itself. Like magic, when the wind picked up or shifted direction slightly, the boat would follow and point up. When it pointed too high, it would slow and fall off, maintaining the balance. The boat was maintaining a fairly tight course and it seemed we were mostly just along for the ride.
However, it could be a bit of a wild ride at times. We experienced countless lightning storms—always a little unsettling when on a boat in the middle of ocean—and plenty of sudden squalls, especially at night when we couldn’t see them coming. One minute we’d be smoothly sailing along under a zillion stars, and the next we’re heeled over to thirty degrees with the wind shrieking at thirty knots and heavy rain pounding us. Usually lasting only a few minutes, the squalls would then move along and everything would quickly return to normal.
Then came a squall that was different. Somewhere a little north of the equator, sometime around two AM, it hit us just as all the other squalls had, except that the wind speed didn’t top out around thirty knots but continued right on up to the high forties, even the low fifties. Had we ever even seen gusts this high before? The boat didn’t immediately heel to thirty degrees, but went right to forty or forty-five degrees. Off-watch and asleep on the low side of the cockpit, the ocean was suddenly inches away, flowing down the side deck and splashing onto my makeshift bed. It was a rude awakening. But the real difference with this super-squall was in how long it lasted. It didn’t calm down and move along after a few minutes. Instead, it showed no sign of letting up, even forty-five minutes later. Its full fury lasted almost on hour.
The jib, the sail at the front of the boat attached between the top of the mast and the far end of the bowsprit, has become our workhorse the last few years. It can be fully (or partially) deployed and furled back up again without ever leaving the cockpit. Sailing downwind, it pulls the boat right along all by itself, and even upwind it works well enough, especially if we employ the mizzen as well. The main sail is the most versatile sail but it is difficult and labor intensive to raise and lower, especially with just the two of us, and especially in higher winds and rough seas. It could turn dangerous in a hurry in a sudden fifty-knot squall. With last year’s total loss of the jib and furler off New Zealand still fresh in our minds, we were obviously worried. When the super-squall did not abate within a few minutes as expected, we turned our attention to reefing the jib, or even furling it in entirely. I checked with a flashlight and could see that the jib was still there, and the metallic reflection of light off the furler indicated that it was also still intact. The furling line was already set up on the winch so all we had to do was crank it in after giving the loaded jib sheet some slack. But when I went to slacken the sheet I discovered that it was totally slack already. The sheet is simply the line that holds the jib in against the force of the wind, kind of like a kite string, and having no air pressure on it at all was obviously not a good sign.
It didn’t really surprise me that the line might’ve chafed through and broken. It, and the lazy sheet (running on the opposite side of the boat and not being used on the current tack) had tangled a few days prior and the lazy sheet had somehow tied itself into a knot around the active sheet. With the knot unreachable about twenty feet above the deck, we had decided to just keep using it as it was since we’d likely stay on the same tack all the way to Hawaii. Except that wasn’t the problem. Closer inspection with the flashlight showed that we hadn’t a clew. Really. The lower rear corner of the sail, the part where both sheets attach, the clew, was completely missing! It had ripped entirely off of the rest of the sail and the jib was strung out in the wind, wildly waving like some big banner which we had no control over. That’s when I got the brilliant if somewhat misguided idea to furl up the sail anyway. I mean, we had to get it rolled up or the wind would just shred it. Sails are costly and time consuming to build. But then, realizing that with no sheets attached to pull on and unfurl it, we worried about how we would ever get it unfurled again. It turned out we needn’t have worried about that. Morning light showed that the wind had taken care of that for us. The sail was strung out like a banner again. It was clearly obvious that we needed to get it down safely onto the deck if we wanted any chance at all to repair it in Hawaii.
We formulated a plan and then Julie, being much more adventurous with these sort of things than I, grabbed a handful of sail ties and webbing straps, clipped herself onto the jack lines, and set out on an expedition to the far reaches of the pointy end of the boat. I couldn’t hear exactly what she was yelling about, but I assumed it was something about what a great plan it was that we’d devised. It looked like fun out there, riding the wild gyrations of the bowsprit, but she did manage to get the sail down and secured to the deck. The fortunate design innovation of the New Zealand “Reef-Rite” furler made this so much safer than it would’ve been with our old furler (seriously), as the sail simply lowers on slides in a track rather than coming completely off the furler, no longer attached to the boat at all. The jib, at more than fifty-two feet long, is our longest sail and is unwieldy enough even on a calm day on flat ground. After that little adventure was over, and with our favorite workhorse sail now useless, we had to use all three of our remaining sails—main, mizzen and staysail—to experiment once again before achieving nearly the same self-sailing balance and a mostly acceptable speed. I was sure we were going to be late for our target arrival of sometime during the week of the Fourth of July.
As the days went by, and the farther away we moved from the equator, the more the climate seemed to change. The days became longer. The humidity dropped and there was a new coolness in the air at night. The squalls became noticeably fewer and weaker. I, for one, became increasingly bored. I read the same book twice, after reading two others in between. With June being the start of the North Pacific hurricane season we thought that maybe we should keep an eye on the weather off the coast of southern Mexico, and when we finally did look, it was a bit of a shock to see tropical storm Alvin possibly heading our way. We worried about it for a couple days, then it fizzled out. With that, and the pleasant sailing conditions we were experiencing, we allowed ourselves to become complacent.
By the time we were about 200 miles south of Oahu and starting to fantasize about what we wanted to do first when we got there, the wind all but died completely. We eked out another fifty miles or so by just sort of ghosting along before realizing that we might be within range of picking up the Hawaii NOAA weather radio broadcast on the VHF. Sure enough, we could. It was scratchy and cut in and out, but we could hear something about hurricane preparations. We heard enough to realize that they were talking about a specific hurricane. What?! So I screwed around with the SSB until finally receiving enough detail to realize that hurricane Barbara, fully developed and at category 4, was located about halfway between Mexico and Hawaii and moving in our direction. Yikes! How did we miss this? And more importantly, what do we do about it now?
We had 150 miles left to go to Oahu. We had zero wind and none predicted for at least the next three days. We had already burned about sixty gallons of diesel out of what had been close to a normal load of 200. We had twenty more gallons in jerry cans on deck. We had about seventy-five gallons of contaminated fuel in our center tank that we didn’t want to even try to use. We calculated that if we started right away we could probably power at six knots for twenty-four hours and make it at least most of the way to Oahu before the storm caught up to us. By this time they were already expecting the hurricane would downgrade to a tropical storm, then dissipate all together before hitting Hawaii. But our best bet was to head for the marina as quickly as possible. We started the engine and motored our way along the remainder of the rhumb line course.
So, why the contaminated fuel? Having put up with a clogged fuel line every time we’ve run off the center tank since before leaving Mexico in 2017, and subsequently having to unclog the line each time by blowing it out with a bicycle pump, then bleeding air out of the entire fuel system, followed by performing a battery-draining, engine-sputtering, re-start ritual—not to mention the question of why we are always replacing so many gunked up fuel filters—we’ve finally grown tired of the entire process and have accepted the inevitable fact that our center tank is likely going the way of so many Westsail 42 fuel tanks after thirty or forty years of use. It’s rusting through, and it is rust particles in the fuel that are clogging the fuel line and the filters. Our boat, like so many before it, will need to have the floor ripped up and cabinets disassembled and removed to get at the tanks in order to remove and replace them. There, I said it out loud. Until then, we need to figure out how to get the roughly seventy-five remaining gallons out of the center tank before it finds a hole and ends up in the bilge which is the last place we’d want that much fuel to be sloshing around or getting accidentally pumped overboard like so much bilge water.
Making really good time over the incredibly smooth seas (calm before the storm?), we arrived at the marina late in the day on the 4th of July. We had been able to make contact by cell phone once we were within range and assigned a slip number over the phone, but our actual arrival was after-hours. We were confined to the boat on the honor system until a bio-security inspection could be done the next day. A Customs officer could not make it to the boat (unofficial four-day holiday weekend?) and asked us to come see them in Honolulu on Monday. The bio-security officer showed up as scheduled on Friday, sealed our trash and confiscated our contraband food, declaring us purged. It wasn’t until she asked us how long we intended to stay that it hit me. I felt like saying, “Forever.” We are citizens here. We need no visa with an expiration date. We need no clearance to our next destination. There is no time limit on exempting our boat from import duties. The rest of the way home is domestic travel. In that sense at least, we are already home. This, in fact, was confirmed on Monday when we drove a rental car into downtown Honolulu, first dropping off our clewless sail at the sailmaker, and then visiting the Customs office in the middle of the container port. After filling out the required myriad numbered forms so typical of the US Government, we asked if there was anything we would need to do after we arrived on the mainland. The answer was, “Nope, you’re home.”
July 11th: Today we had our fuel “polished. The fuel in the center tank was pumped out and run through filters to remove the accumulation of rust particles, as well as some water and algae. Then the fuel was redistributed to the side tanks and the center tank will no longer be used until the day comes when it can be replaced. Until then, we still have to make it across the ocean with only half our normal fuel supply. Hopefully the atmosphere will settle down soon into a more normal summer pattern.
Below is a fax image received through the SSB radio. I missed the beginning of the transmission so it didn’t synchronize properly. We were about 150 miles south of Oahu at the time. It is the first confirmation that trouble could be heading our way. Really a mood changer.
Below is part of an email sent over SSB from SailDocs giving a weather discussion for the eastern Pacific. Describes Barbara as category 4 under SPECIAL FEATURES. Fun stuff.
