Day 6 Panama to Hawaii

Today is Sunday 10 May. Since we set off on Tuesday 6 May, this is already our 6th day at sea. Around 14:00 we’ll have been underway for 5x24 hours, and until yesterday afternoon we motored the whole way. The Yanmar just drones away the hours without a hitch. Since we wanted to keep fuel in reserve, and the wind further on wasn’t going to arrive any sooner anyway, we were in no hurry. At 1500-1600 rpm and 5 to 6 knots we made steady progress.

At times it’s really hot, though: the seawater is 31 (!) degrees. When the sun is out it gets very warm. Some days were nicely overcast, and then it wasn’t too bad. Cooking in particular is a challenge. And now that we’re sailing, most of the hatches have to stay shut, which makes it even hotter. Luckily it will cool down a bit in a few days, to 28 degrees. And around Hawaii it’ll be “only” 24. As long as there’s enough water in the tanks (and in calm weather we can make more with the watermaker), everyone gets a shower every day. That keeps it bearable.

Every day I run a program that works out the best route for us somewhere in the cloud. Some sailors use Windy for that, but it’s nowhere near as good as PredictWind. Since this year I even have one of their “little boxes” on board. It works as an internet router, logs the boat’s sailing data and sends it off to New Zealand. There they build a speed profile that gets refined with every mile we sail. That way they know how fast Merrimac sails, and the forecasts get more and more accurate. They call it “AI”, but that seems a bit of a stretch to me. A plain old set of filters and some averaging would get you there too. Either way, it works like a charm. On Tuesday they said we’d get wind on Sunday morning, and blow me down, it’s now Sunday morning and we have wind!

Other than that, we have lunch, drinks and dinner together every day. Arnold and I skip breakfast; Rudolf has a tub of yoghurt (more on that next time). On the dot of five we have some crisps, peanuts or a bit of cheese/sausage with one beer, or a soft drink. Then the watchkeeper with the first watch cooks, and after dinner the third watchkeeper does the washing up.

The first two days we ate meals Marion had cooked in advance; after that we really had to start cooking ourselves, because the courgette (zucchini) stock was huge and they rot quickly. Sadly, we’ve already had to throw four of them overboard. We shouldn’t have waited until day 5 with the watermelon either: it had gone completely boozy and wasn’t nice anymore. That’s where not having enough room to keep everything in the fridge comes back to bite us. Now that some of it has been eaten, it all just about fits. Maybe things will go better now. The carrots, onions, oranges and apples keep fine without refrigeration. This afternoon we’ll give a pineapple a go!

Apart from that we read, and Arnold also watches films on his phone. And I’m working with Claude on overhauling the boat’s automation. The software is now 16 years old and due for a thorough rewrite. A perfect job for my new favourite programming language, “Rust”. Graphically it looks modern again, and we’re working on new features as well. The displays already switch automatically between day and night mode, and the brightness is adjusted too. That last bit still needs quite a bit of tweaking.

By the way, we have more residents on board than just Arnold, Rudolf and Kees. There’s a cricket that hopped on somewhere in Panama and chirps all night long, but is nowhere to be found. We’re curious whether he or she will make it to Hawaii, and whether we’ll then have to tell the food safety officials: there’s a cricket in here somewhere, go ahead and catch it! On top of that, yesterday for the first time some brown boobies ventured on board. They owe their English name, booby, to the Spanish word bobo, “stupid”. That’s because even back then they had a habit of landing on ships, where they were easily caught and eaten. You really have to flap a halyard in their faces before they’ll leave the spreaders. Later they tried the pulpit, which now has a sheet draped over it so they can’t sit comfortably with their flat feet. Why would we rather not have them? Because they crap all over everything. We’d been warned by Rudolf and by Pitou (Liselotte and Machiel) too!

So far we’ve been on a course of WNW to NW, staying roughly parallel to the coast. Now that the wind has reached us we’re heading almost due west; in two weeks it’ll be WNW again. Just 4040 miles to go to Honolulu!

As soon as we’ve come up with something else to write about, there’ll be another post…