Night Watch

Turns out I like to write when it’s quieter and dark and I’m alone. Tonight/this morning is different, the clouds are lower and moving so fast that it’s harder to use any brighter spots in the sky as points of reference for steering. Right now I can see one planet or star off to port but it’ll be gone in a moment, see the blurry photo above. Earlier tonight the wind was so light we had our lowest speed, 3kts or something. The autopilot seemed so much louder and was moving a lot, no way I could sleep through it back where I was co-bunking with Griffin. Gavin and Ryan tell of double berths that have a dividing lee cloth so you can still share space but not smash the lower person, that sounds amazing. It’s enough to be cradled by the bunk and wall, no one wants another person covering a 3rd side of them, especially as the temperature rises. It’s warm out and light rain is coming through every once in a while so the foulies are on again. When it rains the wind seems to pick up a bit, we could call them little squalls. It’s dry and 13kts now, 10 minutes ago it was gusting to 19kts- why I put the autopilot on again. It’s fun getting better at driving this boat but it’ll take a long time to have as many hours at Rocket Science’s wheels as on the Mara’s tiller.

Earlier in the evening the Barckerts on board had some nice family time chatting with and about different friends and relations. There was a family wedding we missed this last weekend but we’ve now seen photos and gotten reports of the event via FaceTime with Greg’s family. We also chatted about how lucky we are to have this time together and possibly getting to share it with even more people than are on board now. Our crew is really fantastic and this watch schedule facilitates us hanging out more during daylight hours which is really nice. Starlink let us wish all available fathers a happy day yesterday. I honored mine with some strong coffee and I feel so grateful for his roll in this adventure. 

We drug some lures in the water yesterday and a bit the day before too but haven’t caught anything yet. We’re just starting to have a little room in the freezer so it must be time to fill it up again? This ocean fishing thing is a bit of a mystery- you drag a lure some distance behind you on a hand line or on a pole and the lure flies along the surface. Speed is what it is, no slowing down for the catch. Paul sent some little weights with his hand line, maybe we’ll try one of those tomorrow. We did see some dolphins chasing something yesterday right after I put out my line. They were chasing something almost as large as they were, we could see it jumping sometimes as they swam in a big circle around us. We quickly reeled our lines back in not wanting to interfere.

Getting to do some fishing speaks to how we’re doing, having time and energy for things other than basic survival is new for me at least (Ryan has knitting, Gavin and Leo have been reading). I’ve napped. 

We’ve now crossed the Tropic of Cancer, so close to the solstice! Check out the tracker for how far we’ve come.