Author Archives: sailmakai

1865 miles to go

This morning I saw what looked like activity from whales, I saw what a few whale spouts. I also saw lots of flying fish and one pilot whale that dove near the boat. While inspecting the main sail, I noticed a bolt was about to come out of one of the sail cars. We dropped the main sail partway, and we added a nut to the bolt.
We are currently steering just above the great circle route. As I’m sure you are aware, the great circle route is the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, as opposed to the straight line distance. The GPS gives us the great circle route. In addition to this we also download the Grib files (gridded binary files). These contain the wind predictions over a large area of the ocean for the next 7 days. Rodney has a software program that will take the grib files, and our route, and optimize the route. Sometimes it’s near the great circle route, sometimes not. In this case, we will head above the great circle route for a few days, then drop down below it. The distance will be longer than the great circle route, but the boat will be sailing faster.

Hope you are all doing well.

Eric

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Rodney’s Blog

Visit Azure II’s blog.  Rodney has some great descriptions of their daily activities.

We met Rodney and Jane in the late 90s at an Orange Coast College Sailing Center class to learn a little Cruiser’s Spanish before heading south.  They left on Azure that year and we left 2 years later.  Rodney and Jane sailed through Mexico and across the Pacific to New Zealand.  From New Zealand, Eric had the privilege of doing the phone patch to Rodney’s dad to announce that Rodney Jr. was born.  After we all came back from our adventures and began having babies, they went back to Alameda and we settled in Long Beach/Cypress, communication slowed down and the diaper changes increased.  Then one day a few years back Rodney and Jane announced they were buying the very same boat Eric had been researching as the perfect family cruising boat, a Leopard 47 catamaran.  About a year and a half ago we went to visit them in the British Virgin Islands, the kids had fun with RJ and Leo.  They all fished, played king of the kayak, swam to the beach, did cannon balls, begged for 4pm screen time, and snorkeled around.  Over the summer the Pimentel family completed their adventure with a tour of the Mediterranean Sea and put Azure II up for sale.  We jumped on the chance to continue their adventure.  We plan to head out next fall.  Until then our adventures will be here on land.

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Soul Sailor

Rodney is vying for the Soul Sailor award.
We have sailed 870 miles without turning on the engine for propulsion, sail only.
If all goes well we hope to make it the whole way across that way.
This boat has two 54 hp yanmar diesel engines. We carry about 125 gallons of fuel, and could motor for 10 days straight, if need be.

Eric

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2013 miles to go

We are getting used to being on the boat and underway 24/7.  The seas have calmed down and the weather is warming up.  It hardly feels like we are underway  Today was laundry day. Now that the generator is working, we can use the washing machine (on a boat?).  It works great, I washed all my shirts.  We hang the clothes to dry on the lifelines with clothes pins.
I was bummed because I wasn’t getting any emails from Jackie, so I called her on the satellite phone.  It turns out that all my emails (kq6np@winlink.org) were going to hotmail’s spam folder  (Greg, can you forward this to Jackie (sailmakai@hotmail.com), in case it gets in the spam folder again ?)  It was great to hear everyone’s voices.
The grib files show more wind starting tomorrow, potentially 20-25, so we will really make some progress.  This boat really moves in that kind of wind.  The motion on a multihull is different from a monohull.  I have been very fortunate that I haven’t been seasick on this trip, I think is a combination of the different motion on the catamaran, and the fact that I’ve gotten older, and I think my balance has gotten worse, so I’m not as sensitive as I used to be.

Tonight’s movie was Animal House, in honor of Rodney and Jamie being in fraternities in colleges.  We also watched some great movies taken by Irving Johnson.  He was on the Peking, that last of the great commercial sailing ships that went around the horn in 1929. The ship was in the nitrate trade between Hamburg and Chile.   The footage was fantastic.

I mention the movie in the evening because back when Jackie and I were cruising Mexico, we left Puerto Vallerta for La Paz one evening with Capricorn Cat.  We were all battened down and left at the same time as they did. We were heeling over, not doing anything except holding on.  Later that evening we called Capricorn Cat, they were just making popcorn and getting ready to watch a movie.  Jackie and I looked at each other.

Eric

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2115 miles to go

Today was a big maintenance day. We have been waiting for the swells to go down so we could look at fixing the generator. Access to the generator is via a hatch near the rear starboard hull. With the big waves and the speed we have been doing, every once in a while the waves would wash up the rear steps. We didn’t want the rear lazarette to get swamped. It was calmer today, but we still had some wave action, so they opened up the hatch, shoved me in, and gave me a headlamp, and a vhf radio. The generator was bought in Greece and was originally configured for 240 volts, and reconverted back to 110, but it was having some problems. I poked around for a bit, then realized I needed a few more tools. I called on the mobile vhf, but got no answer! I figured I might be in there a while, but I was able to knock on the hull and get their attention. After some fiddling around with the wiring, I was able to get the generator up and running. With the generator operational, we were able to make water. We made about 50 gallons of fresh water, so both tanks were completely full. We carry two water tanks, each holding 100 gallons of water.

While we were inspecting the boat, Rodney noticed that the jib had damaged the flood lamp, which is located about 30 feet up the mast. The smallest guy gets to go up and take down the flood lamp. Guess who is the smallest guy in the crew. It wasn’t too bad, the mast doesn’t move around nearly as violently as a monohull. I was able to get the old lamp apart and disconnected. We also had a shackle on the roller furling come loose, and they were able to replace the shackle.

It’s getting warmer, at 10:15 pm, it’s 76 inside the cabin. We are in t-shirt and shorts weather during the day, soon it will be the same at night.

This evening’s movie was “The Dish” an interesting movie about the Parkes radio dish in Australia and it’s use during the Apollo 11 mission.

Later,
Eric

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2193 miles to go

We had a great day today. I got up for my 6-8 am watch, we are still running on GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), so the sun doesn’t really come up until about 7:30. I fire up the port engine for an hour to charge up the batteries and pull down the freezer. Around noon, I broke out the sextant and we took a bunch of sightings for practice. We did a noon site, and did pretty good for our first trial, I was off by about 8 miles in latitude, and 60 miles in longitude, we’ll do better as time goes on. We had pasta for dinner, and we watched John Wayne’s “The Quiet Man” for entertainment after the movie. We are educating Rodney on the finer points of John Wayne Movies. I am now on my 8-10pm watch, the moon is half full and it’s really nice outside. I’m watching the water, and listening to my ipod. It’s weird to not see any land, the water all looks the same out here. We are making good progress, we are doing between 6-8 knots.

Eric

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Watches

We have watches that last 2 hours. There are 12 watches in a 24 hour time period. I have from 6-8 am, 12-2pm, and 10-12pm.

It’s really nice having 4 people on board, we have 6 hours to rest between watches.

Rodney is a great cook. we eat pasta every other night. He precooked food before hand, to reheat for the other dinners. Last night we had his famous curry chicken. We still have chili and beef stroganoff to try.

Eric

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Track s/v Azure II

Three guys have a SPOT on this crossing.  The Find me SPOT is a device that transmits it’s current position every 10 minutes.

Eric’s SPOT

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0q3T2dcKJSRn1moiI5uG6qEUJ8GfHvlai

Rodney’s SPOT

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0WOUnoFlnhAgJEMeQDg9d3B5qtT0TaHuu

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They’re about ready to go

Hi,

The front crossmember is in, and installed:

 

The bottom has been cleaned:

Today we will finish tightening up the rigging, get fuel, make water, and check out of the country.  We should be leaving sometime later today.

Eric

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Message from Eric

We are at the Marina at Las Palmas on Grand Canaria.  We have boatwork to do before we leave.  I’m working on fixing leaky watermaker fittings. Rodney went off to Customs this morning to clear the new cross member.  I’m getting practice with my Spanish.  The marina is fun to walk around and see all the boats from around the world.

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