We made it (with pictures)!

We're in Honolulu. We got to the marina around 9:00 yesterday morning, tied Pensive to the dock, and set out in search of some bread. The marina is directly across the street from a shopping mall, so croissants and fruit were easy to find, but the crowd and the noise of the mall were a little shocking to us. After breakfast, we headed back to the boat to put everything in order and do some final boat repairs for its trip back to Seattle, and left for a hotel. I took a 7.5 hour shower (The girls went first. They won the contest.), Jason had a nap, and we all just relaxed for a while before heading to a restaurant for dinner. No cooking, no cleanup, but we did joke about how it felt strange to have individual glasses and plates and utensils instead of just a bowl and a spoon each, to leave our bowls on the table without worrying about them sliding right off, and to not have to eat as quickly as absolutely possible before a big wave knocks us off balance or the wind chills the food. It was delightful.

We were all surprised by how easy it was to walk when we finally got off of the boat. We'd expected some adjustments, but it was fine...until we went to bed. Wow. This might be the strangest part of the whole trip. I slept fabulously (No night watches!! Yay!!), but every time I woke up in the night, it felt like the bed had tilted in a different direction. I woke up this morning convinced that the hotel was tilted to starboard. It still feels that way. I almost fell down trying to turn on the bathroom light because the floor shifted beneath me. It's absolutely bizarre. Jason is having the same experience, but the girls feel completely normal, and they're a little disappointed about it!

We're flying back to Seattle tomorrow.

Optimism (Ignorance?)

Misery 

Happiness

The sun rises and sets 

Land ho!

Land!! We spotted Molokai around 4:00 this afternoon, and Oahu not long after that. (Jason said, "I see Oahu," and I thought he said "I see a wahoo" and was pretty confused for a minute.) We were still about 25 miles away, but that didn't dampen our excitement at all. Honolulu is on the far side of Oahu, through the Kaiwi Channel, so we're now about 40 miles away from our final destination. We've got one more night on the Pacific and then we'll head in to the marina early tomorrow morning. If there's any way to make it in time for breakfast, we've all decided what we're hoping to find. Bread and fruit. Any kind.

The last couple of days have been superb. We've had fantastic weather interrupted by brief spurts of rain, done more swimming, and still get a kick out of teak surfing -- always with someone on board, of course, in case of another slip off of the line. Grace said she wasn't scared, but I was. It was shocking to me how quickly she disappeared behind the swells, and that was the flattest water we've seen for the whole trip.

Jason woke me up a couple of nights ago to help him take down a sail that had ripped in the night. While we were working, he flipped on a big spotlight to help us see what we were doing, and my first reaction was to feel self-conscious about crouching in my swimsuit bottom and pajama top (yes, that's what I was sleeping in), with my crazy hair flying around in the wind, trying desperately to reach a line and not fall off of the boat. I guess I forgot that we were alone in the ocean. Not a lot of bystanders.

I woke up to the sound of birds this morning, which was weird, and now we can see lights on Oahu, which is REALLY weird. We haven't been seeing any lights at all at night except for the stars, and maybe a ship in the distance every few nights, and now there are all of these lights on the horizon. It's very disorienting. We just had a family conference about whether we were seeing a star or a ship or a lighthouse.

Last night, we had mac and cheese, and tonight, spaghetti with marinara sauce. Tomorrow, we'll be eating in a restaurant! Excitement abounds!

Tuesday, June 16

The last couple of days have been pretty uneventful, sunny and quiet. We caught another fish or two and did some swimming and lots of reading. We're just a few hundred miles from Hawaii now, and Clive, our bird friend seems to have abandoned us. I'll miss him. We spent a fair amount of time last night snacking on popcorn and trying to identify constellations and planets, but none of us are very good at it. We think we found Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and possibly even Pluto. Or maybe they were airplanes. I'm only confident about the Big Dipper.

We have a system called AIS that detects other boats, and often, we can look up details about the boats -- what kind of boats they are, where they're coming from, where they're headed. It also broadcasts our details to others. Last night, we spotted a thousand-foot cargo ship a few miles away, headed straight toward us on their way to Beijing. They didn't appear to see us, so we dropped our sails and changed course to avoid them. When the coast was clear, we hoisted the sails again and corrected our direction. A couple of hours later, I came out to check the AIS on schedule and spotted a boat a few miles away. I looked up the details and saw that it was a thousand-foot cargo ship on its way to Beijing. Because its course was on a straight line with ours, I woke Jason so we could drop the sails to avoid them. He pointed out that it was the same boat we'd already avoided, only now it was headed directly away from us. Perhaps I'm not all that valuable as a middle-of-the-night watcher. Maybe they'll let me skip my turns from now on.

Because the trip has taken us longer than we expected, we're going to skip our planned stop at Hilo and go directly to Honolulu, where the crew who's bring Pensive home will meet us. We expect to arrive on Friday morning and then, with luck, be back in Seattle sometime over the weekend.

After a rough start, the last part of the trip has really been fantastic. I think we all feel a little bittersweet about its coming to an end. It's going to be a hard act to follow!

Last night's dinner was pasta with white clam sauce, tonight's is chicken paprikash and broccoli.

Girl overboard!

Hi! It's Grace again.

"Dolphins! Girls, there are dolphins!" Nora and I crawled out of our sleeping bags with our hair going everywhere and stumbled toward the cockpit. When we got to the bow, the sun had just come up, and there were ten or fifteen dolphins swimming and jumping around us. They were right in front of us and less than four feet away sometimes. We could see the cute little faces and fins of the happy creatures. It was one of the best good mornings ever.

After our breakfast of cereal, rice cakes and peanut butter, or ramen noodles, we noticed that the fishing line we had left out overnight was pretty tight. Papa pulled it in and we saw a terrifying toothy thing. It was long, silver, spiky, and just plain scary. We decided not to eat it because it didn't have a whole lot of meat on it. (Plus Mama said it was too ugly to eat, anyway.)

Later, the sun was beating down, and Mama wanted to try being dragged behind the boat to cool off. (We're going pretty slowly because the wind is light, and we just want to keep moving if possible.) As we strung a line to hang from the stern, Papa and I joked about having to circle back for a man overboard drill. We thought Mama was crazy, and it definitely looked weird, but it was really super fun to slip off the swim platform and grab the line to be dragged. Papa did a cool twisty thing to slide off the platform and I decided to try it, too. Why not? As I bounced off, the water pulling me and the sunscreen on my hands jerked the line away from me, and I was underwater, thinking, I'm not attached to the boat anymore. I popped up and saw the boat leaving me. Quickly. I was alone in the ocean. I actually wasn't scared and just enjoyed watching the boat turn around to come get me. I thought, this is the farthest I have been from those people in three whole weeks. They came and got me easily and no one seemed scared.

We swam again after that also. We took in the sails this time and jumped off the bow and swam in the clear blue water. Over five hundred miles offshore, we were enjoying the prettiest water I've ever seen.

A nice long, sunny afternoon followed and ended with the wahoo from yesterday for dinner. Actually, our day hadn't ended yet. Right after we finished dinner, we looked over to see a taut fishing line and splashing on the end. We hurried to clean up and Nora reeled in a 30-inch wahoo. Papa quickly took care of him and we watched a beautiful sunset. Now our day has ended.

Sailing stuff:

For those interested in the technical stuff about sailing, this is Jason. I could really geek out about all the various lines, halyards, sails, and rigging and then go on and on about diesel mechanics, watermakers, electrical systems, plumbing and deck maintenance, but I can save that for the up close and personal interview, if needed. All I can say is that while the LA to Honolulu route may be considered "the milk run," the North Pacific stuff from Neah Bay was not so milky...or pacific. There are days in my log where I entered apparent winds of NW 25 to 35 knots, and we were heading downwind. There are nights that we were not quite close hauled and seeing 30 knots, sails reefed to the size of handkerchiefs, and swells of 20 feet. I felt that for the first ten days, we were under assault by the seas, winds, and skies. That being said, all is wonderful now. We have cruised along all day the last two days with the huge cruising spinnaker up, the full mainsail out and prevented, and comfortably making good time in light wind and seas. The last three days have seen the NNW of 15 to 20 kts clock around to E then ESE wind of 10 to 12 knots and the swell and wind waves have really died off the last three or 4 days, too. Today was the smoothest yet, wind waves of 2 to 3 feet from the E, swell 4 feet from the NE but with something like a 15 second period and consistent gentle ESE winds around 10 knots. This is finally the kind of sailing that I think I'm qualified to do! We hope for another good day tomorrow.

Creatures of the sea

Last night, when we turned off all the lights, we marveled at the phosphorescence in addition to the stars. We've seen it before (our toilets draw water from outside the boats, and the first time I saw the toilet glowing, I woke everyone up. My family is very tolerant. No one said a word about my waking everyone in the middle of the night to come gather around and watch me flush), but watching it in the middle of the ocean was something altogether different. There are huge pieces, like basketballs of glowingness.

Today, we swam. I was terrified (of what? sharks? being left behind? glowing in the dark? mythological sea monsters?), but I still suggested it, so we put the sails down, threw out the life preserver, just in case, climbed up on top of the solar panels, and dove in anyway. The water is clear and blue, and nothing came up from the depths to snatch us away. We would have seen it coming for miles if it had, anyway. It wasn't even quite as cold as I expected. I think we'll do it again tomorrow.

And we caught a fish! We were untangling the lines -- again! -- when Grace realized there was something pulling on hers. We got him (a 26" wahoo) up into the boat, and then Jason conked him -- repeatedly -- with the mallet we have. I don't have a lot of fishing experience, and he was a lot harder to kill than I expected. He got fish guts and blood on everything. I finally had to take off my 3-week pants. We thought he was dead, and a minute later, he came back to life and started flopping around the boat again. That was a bit of a surprise. When Jason gutted him, he found another little fish inside. I excused myself at that point, but Jason gave the girls an anatomy lesson while they dissected him. I'm told that his brain was about the size of a soybean, half as big as his eyes.

Dinner tonight was lentil curry. I'm betting we'll have fish tomorrow.

Nights

I have worn the same pair of pants every day for three weeks. In that three weeks, I have had one shower and combed my hair twice. I don't know if my face is tan or just dirty. This morning, I used mascara (yes, I brought mascara, and four different shades of lipstick -- one for each pair of shoes, maybe?) to draw a monobrow and a mustache on myself, just to see how they would look. I don't think they were flattering. Jason laughed, Grace was embarrassed for me, and Nora just told me I had something on my face.

l sleep in the bow of the boat. No one else likes it much, although occasionally Nora takes pity on me and sleeps there with me. It's loud -- all that water rushing past makes a lot of noise -- and bumpy -- when the boat comes over the crest of a wave and slams back down, the bow takes the brunt of the impact. Usually, the boat rocks primarily to one side at night, so I sleep in the angle between the mattress and the side of the boat, and sometimes, I can feel the pressure of the water against the side of the boat. I can't understand why no one else likes it.

During the first part of our trip, when conditions were pretty bad and we felt like we were constantly fighting against the elements, Jason spent several nights camping out on deck, so I can't begrudge him a good sleeping spot now. I'd go out to check on him once in a while, but then I'd get to come back inside to my warm sleeping bag in the bow. After things got a little quieter, we changed our watch plan. Instead of someone sitting up for several hours straight, we all just take turns getting up every hour to go out and check on things. We go alphabetically - Grace has the 10pm and 2am checks, Jason 11 and 3, Nora 12 and 4, and I get 1 and 5. We don't actually know what time zone we're in anymore. We've set our watches back one hour, so we're an hour ahead of Seattle time right now. Regardless, the watch plan seems to be working. We haven't run into anything yet. In fact, we haven't seen any other boats in several days.

I can't talk about nights without mentioning the stars. We've had a couple of clear nights, and the stars are absolutely amazing out here. I expected we'd be able to see them clearly, but somehow they also look bigger.

Despite the fact the some people (Matt) find it amusing, I do continue to be pleasantly surprised that we're all getting along pretty well. It doesn't feel like we're just tolerating each other, either, but actually still enjoying each other's company. I really wasn't sure how long that would last. The shower score is 2-1 now, though. I had Nora just go ahead and give us an extra point so that I could tell Jason everything he's done wrong since the beginning of the trip. He was tremendously grateful.

Today was, again, lovely. We had a couple of quick little rain bursts, but otherwise, sunshine all day. Our dinner tonight was sopa seca, pinto beans, and roasted cabbage, and we're expecting another sunset.

Does anybody know what day it is?

There is a terrible lack of raw material to write about here. We eat, we sleep, we read, we play games. I'm not bored living it, but it doesn't exactly lend itself to interesting stories. Nora has been reading some books out loud to us, and we're keeping up our family tradition of doing a Super Quiz from the newspaper together every evening. (We printed a bunch of them before we left.)

Today, we had our first day of uninterrupted sunshine. We also had good wind and calm seas. It was a lovely day. We also think we're seeing less garbage and more flying fish. Speaking of fish, Jason has been putting out fishing lines behind the boat, but he either catches garbage or tangles multiple lines together. No actual fish. Yet.

We are experiencing our - are you ready for it? - third sunset. Yes, the sun has set every night, but we haven't been able to see it behind the clouds. That's an average of one per week, but I have a feeling it's going to get a lot better over the next few days.

Dinners: spam musubi, chicken provencal with polenta and broccoli, tomato soup, ramen noodles

Kelly: Thanks for the moonlight dancing. I think it worked!

Kayte: That's some weird stuff going on out there in the real world. We have a microwave, but it kills the batteries, so we can't use it! I guess the ramen burritos will have to wait.

Things start to get more fun

Finally, finally, we've had a couple of days in a row with sunshine and good wind. Hooray!!

We're making progress toward Hawaii, but the weather we had along the coast and the two hurricanes off of Mexico have put us somewhat behind schedule. We're not sure exactly when we'll arrive, but we're thinking probably around June 18 or 19.

During our trip south along the coastline, we passed through an area where little sailing jellyfish would wash up onto our boat at night. Now we're in the squid zone. For the last few days, we've found multiple squids, about eight inches long, on the deck in the mornings. We weren't overly enamored of the jellyfish, but the squids are just gross. The extremely ugly bird that I made friends with a couple of weeks ago, Clive, continues to visit us every day. We've also seen some dolphins, a shark, a couple of turtles and flying fish, and a fair amount of garbage. It's not like we're sailing through a landfill, but we see several random pieces of garbage every day. There are lots of loose fishing net buoys and various plastic household items, like dish tubs. Some things are clearly remnants that washed away in the Japanese tsunami.

Yesterday, we were overtaken by a sudden squall that made one of our sails freak out. We moved fast to pull it in, but the wind caught one of the lines and sent it flying through the air like it was possessed. It got wrapped around our anchor, so Jason and I had to crawl up to the bow of the boat while Grace and Nora kept the other lines under control. Jason kept the line from whipping us while I climbed out over the anchor and untangled things. We managed that, but it wasn't enough excitement for one day, so we also decided that we should patch the little holes in our main sail before they got worse. That meant my climbing (or being hauled, really) partway up the mast to reach the holes with the handy dandy sail repair kit. As you get higher, of course, the side-to-side motion of the boat gets more dramatic, so we had several different safety lines rigged to keep me from swinging too far out and then slamming back into the mast as I swung back. I went up the mast, but Jason was more nervous than anyone else! He held me steady while the girls hauled me up and lowered me to safety again.

The shower score is still one to nothing, and we're all continuing to get along pretty well. We're turning out to be a really good team. We've all sort of fallen into different roles, but
I think we'd all be perfectly willing to take on someone else's job if needed. I wouldn't want to take this trip with anyone else.

Today we saw a ship off in the distance and an airplane flew overhead. Exciting!

Recent dinners were mac & cheese with bacon (the bacon was Grace's idea, and it was incredibly good) and roasted cabbage, and a tamale pie with refried beans. Tonight is pasta with tuna and capers.

Minor things, major difficulties

So we had a bad day. It was pretty pitiful, really, all of us sitting around, staring at each other mournfully. We're back on track now, though. We've still had to do battle with some high winds and huge waves, but nothing terrible has happened, we're all still getting along reasonably well, and things are looking brighter. It's just in time, too, because we've evidently reached the part of the trip where things start breaking. Our radar detector doodad fell off, and we've got some little holes in one of our sails. Nothing disastrous. Yet. We ended the terrible day with a dinner of tuna muffins, which tasted just as revolting as they sound. Yesterday we had some sunshine, then black beans and quinoa for dinner, followed by a rousing game of seated charades.

Grace is helping me out today with a description of our day-to-day existence:

Hi everyone! Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get dressed in the morning, or brush your teeth, or eat soup? It's really easy to do all of those things without falling over or spilling it on yourself if you are on land. Unless there's an earthquake of course. When you wake up in the morning, do you have to climb out of a cage? We do. We have to put a canvas cloth from the side of the bed to the wall so that we don't fall out during the night. Ater you've (literally) climbed out of bed, to get to the bathroom you either have to hold onto shelf ledges and walls constantly or crawl in an attempt to not fall and bash your face in. Once you finally reach your destination, to brush your teeth you have to open the cabinet, and get your stuff out super fast, so that all the contents don't slide back at you. We all learned that the hard way. When you are done brushing your teeth and bracing yourself against the wall, you have to get your face as close to the drain as possible so that as the boat tips, the spit doesn't come flying back at you. Wouldn't that be exciting, though? Finally finished being tossed around in the bathroom, you can tackle the challenge of getting dressed. The first step is relatively easy. Put on as many layers as you can while sitting down. (You still slide but it doesn't hurt as much as it might if you were standing.) Now you may not have realized thi,s but putting pants on is actually an art with various techniques. There is the quick-stand-up-shove-your-feet-down-the-legs-and-yank-up-the-waist-before-you-fall-down method, or the slightly more graceful put-your-feet-in-while-sitting-down-then-stand-to-pull-them-up, or you can just skip 'em. Thankfully, so far everyone has managed to get pants on everyday, no matter how difficult. Now on to making and eating breakfast. We normally have rice cakes and peanut butter that we all use the same spoon for. You have to watch, though, because someone might try to lick the spoon before everyone has used it, and no matter where you are on earth, it's gross. Breakfast is downright easy compared to the rest of the day. Waiting for lunch, we sit in the cockpit with our lifejackets on and leashes attaching us to the boat so that if we fall off we just get dragged behind until someone notices, or we die from the frigid water. The leashes, however, don't keep us from tumbling around and bouncing off of each other, so we just brace ourselves and pray. When it comes time for dinner, it's a group effort. Papa is in charge of minimizing the rocking as much as possible, Nora, and Mama, and I take turns fetching ingredients. cooking, and washing dishes. When the food is ready to eat, we are not very civilized anymore. We crouch down with our faces as close to the dishes as possible, in hopes that the wind won't splatter it all in our faces. Somehow, I'm the only one who figured that out the messy way. Why no one enlightened me, I don't know. Finally, after waiting all day to go to bed so that we can wake up in the morning and repeat it all, we go through the whole toothbrushing-undressing adventure again. Next, we climb into our sleeping bags and sleep. This is pretty much how every day goes. The only variety is what we do to entertain ourselves and what we eat for dinner.

Sidler-Dever family: We opened the survival kit yesterday and were so excited! Nora and I tried the peanut butter cups immediately and were practically bouncing around in excitement. We tested the Whoopie cushion soon after and discovered that it is pretty convincing. Thank you so so so much. Your box made our day.

Thursday, June 4, I think

We're all feeling pretty discouraged. Before we set off on this trip, we read, we researched, we talked to people who've done it. No one anywhere mentioned conditions like what we're experiencing. We were expecting a pretty rough five or six days down the coast, but then, everyone and everything said that once we start heading west and meet up with the tradewinds, things settle down, and it's idyllic. That is definitely not what's happening. We've been heading west for three days now. We've seen one sunset, a couple of days ago. We're still wearing at least three layers of clothes. We're continuing to battle 30mph winds (that's constant, not gusts) and HUGE waves, 10 or 15 feet high. They come from every direction, crashing over the boat in frequent but unpredictable intervals. Everything is wet and covered in a thick layer of salt, we're all bruised and battered, and it's feeling like it's never going to end. We're all sure we'll make it to Hawaii, but we're not sure we'll enjoy any of it. Sailing is going to have to start bringing me lots of flowers soon, or we're headed for a breakup.

Our last two dinners were chili mac and budae jjigae (Korean Army Stew - spam, kimchi, and ramen)

Oh, and the girls are winning the shower contest. Jason and I exchanged harsh words yesterday.

Monday, June 1

Today was absolutely fantastic. We didn't need to get an early start, so we slept in a little, left the marina around 10:00 this morning and continued heading south. It was, as usual, grey and cloudy and wet, but the ocean was calmer, so we didn't get body-slammed around the boat every 27 seconds. Around 4:00 this afternoon, we sailed into blue skies and delighted in some glorious sunshine for about an hour and a half. Not long after the clouds started closing in again, we spotted some gray whales and had a fabulous show of breaching and spouting and acrobatics. They're amazing.

Yesterday was good, too -- two good days in a row! I got the perfect birthday presents (a book of yo-yo tricks and a yo-yo, a book of balloon animals and some balloons (yes, I'm like a nine-year-old), and a cowbell), we got to dry out all of our wet stuff, and we went for an actual walk on land.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon
lunch: at the marina's fish shack
dinner: birthday (pineapple upside down) cake

Today:
breakfast: scones and jam
lunch: snacks
dinner: pasta with veggies

Sunday, May 31

Fort Bragg!

Just kidding! 

Friday night was tough. Huge waves, gale force winds, pretty wild. Early Saturday morning found Jason and me sitting in the cockpit together, wearing as many clothes as we could manage to wear and still move, shivering and miserable, but headed for Fort Bragg and a little respite from the rough seas. Around 7:30, we made our way up the little inlet to the marina...only to learn that they don't have any services unless you're a commercial fishing boat. They recently shut down their fuel dock, and now fuel is delivered by truck, available Monday through Friday, by appointment only. The nearest marina with a working fuel dock was in Bodega Bay, about 80 miles south. Eighty miles doesn't sound like much -- you could drive it in an hour and a half -- but on Pensive, it's a full day's sail. After we moaned and cried and felt sorry for ourselves for a little while, we headed south. 

We made it to Bodega Bay around 8:00 last night, tied up at the first empty slip we found, and went to sleep. And here we are. The weather report tells us that coastal wind is extremely light right now, but should start acting normal again by Tuesday morning, so we're deciding how long we want to stay here.  

Once we resigned ourselves to what felt like more wasted time, yesterday's trip was pretty nice. We all rolled our eyes at our own ridiculousness. "Pretty nice" means we only wore three or four layers of clothes instead of five or six! Fantastic! It was still mostly grey and cloudy, but a little warmer. 

I picked up my phone (now used as a clock) sometime Friday night and held it up over my face to see what time it was, a strong wave hit us and knocked it out of my hand, and now I have a phone-shaped bruise on my face. That pretty much sums up Friday night. 

Yesterday was my birthday, but when the girls woke up and realized we weren't stopping at Fort Bragg, after all, they suggested we pretend it's today instead. I think that's an excellent idea. Today is already much better than yesterday, and my birthday celebration has now begun. Instead of having a "community glass" of water, we all got our own glasses at breakfast today! Big time partying. The grey skies are looking a little brighter, and the marina here has unlimited hot water for showering!  

The trip so far is not exactly going the way we'd imagined it, but we're doing okay. We're all still laughing a lot. No one has suggested we call it quits. We've still got some Tostitos and some ramen noodles left. We're continuing to believe that the sun will shine on us eventually. Our shower score is zero-zero, even though we've had a few close calls, and even though Nora has tried to trick us into arguing a few times. She's sneaky. 

Yesterday's menu: 

breakfast: leftovers

lunch: tuna salad on crackers

dinner: roasted salmon with bok choy

Today's: 

breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon

lunch, dinner: TBD

Friday, May 29

The gods are against us. The weather since we left Seattle has been the same every single day: overcast, grey, damp, and cold. The wind has been misbehaving, too. For the last two months, it's been acting predictably, but as soon as we came out of our safe little bay, things went wacky. I'm writing this now with 20ft waves coming at us from every direction. It's crazy. We've zigged and zagged and made a little star pattern as we've come south, and today we learned that there's a tropical storm, Andres, forming off the coast of Baja California. He looks like he's going to turn into a hurricane and move northwest -- possibly headed the same way we will be. We don't really want to meet him, so we've revised our plan a little bit. We're currently about 60 miles from Ft Bragg, so we're going to head that way and tuck in until we see what Andres is going to do. We've all been wearing the same clothes for a week now, and we don't smell very good. I hope they let us into the marina. We'll reevaluate the rest of our route after we find out what Andres is planning.

We saw millions of those little jellyfish our first few days out, and then they disappeared. They were back today, and in even bigger numbers than before. There were entire blankets of them on the surface of the water. No one has been brave or desperate enough to eat one.

We usually keep the water pressure turned off and just turn it on when we need it. I turned it on before dinner, and a little later, Grace opened the door to their bathroom. You've seen those cartoons where someone opens a door and a wall of water flows out? That's pretty much what happened. Somehow the girls' shower got turned on and it completely flooded their bathroom, and those 20ft waves I mentioned were just rocking it out into the cabin every couple of seconds. I got the drain pump turned on to suck most of it out, but now all of our towels and laundry are soaked through. If we had some sunshine, maybe we could dry them, but it seems the sun is afraid of us. He just keeps hiding.

We've been out here for almost a week, and the constant sameness is surreal. l knew that there wouldn't be a lot of landmarks, but the unchanging weather and horizons make us feel a little crazy. We can easily imagine that we're the only people left in the world. We haven't even seen any other boats, except for a tanker just beyond the horizon that almost looked like a ghost ship, it was so faint. If we didn't have our GPS, we'd have no reason to believe that we're even moving - we could just be on an endless ocean treadmill.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon
lunch: pretzels
dinner: chili and cornbread

Today's:
breakfast: leftovers
lunch: ramen noodles
dinner: mac & cheese, tomato soup

Wednesday, May 27

We'd been warned that it takes about three days for seasickness to abate, and as long as we're counting days of ocean sailing, not just days on the boat, that seems to be about right. We're all feeling much better now. We managed to keep a sense of humor about it -- the barf jokes were flying like crazy. If you can laugh while you've got your head in a bucket, you know things haven't gotten too terrible. We're all very, very happy to be past that stage, though.

Anyway, we anchored at Neah Bay on Saturday night. Remember that fishing derby I mentioned happening there over the weekend? Know what that means? Lots and lots of dead fish. Those dead fish draw sea lions and walruses and birds, and they all stink like crazy. It was sort of equal parts cool and disgusting. It was a quiet place to spend the night, and we could have done worse than waking to the chorus of dozens of sea lions piled on top of each other and seeing eagles perched everywhere.

Since then, we've seen a few dolphins and billions of jellyfish. The jellyfish wash up onto the boat with the waves. The water drains off, but the jellyfish stick to the deck. They're only about the size of a silver dollar, and they have handy little wings that you can use to pick them up and throw them back where they belong. Yesterday, I saw a bird. He was big and ugly, but I said hello anyway, and I'm pretty sure we're friends now.

We left Sunday morning and headed out into the ocean. Where the waters of the strait met the waters of the ocean, it was a swirly whirly mess. The winds weren't behaving nicely, either, so we had to go way west of our intended route and then come back east, which felt like a frustrating waste of time. We're back on track now.

It's cold. We knew it would be cold for a few days, but we didn't know it would be this cold. We're all wearing all of the clothes we brought, and for a while, we couldn't all be on deck at the same time because we didn't have enough clothes for everyone. We don't have a thermometer on the boat, but I'd estimate it to be about -432º. I'm not sure why the ocean hasn't frozen over. I've decided that it's going to be sunny and warm in two more days. I'm basing that on pure, desperate, blind hope.

The menu for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday:
breakfast: rice
lunch: nothing
supper: rice

Today's menu:
breakfast: berry muffins
lunch: baked potatoes with salsa
supper: chicken tagine, spinach and mushrooms

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Kayte: ramen burritos? I'm intrigued.

Sara A.: Thanks for the tip about ginger pills. I don't know if they're helping, but I'm afraid to stop taking them.

Martha: Eggs are fabulous, and we love your illustrations.

Robbie: I've been daydreaming about a Bloody Mary. I'll be coming in to see you very soon after we're back in town.

Tuesday, May 26

We're still alive, just seasick. It's been a rough few days, but I think it's improving. We remain in good spirits. More tomorrow, I hope.

Friday, May 22 - Saturday, May 23

This morning, in the pre-dawn darkness around 4:00, I was leaning out over the bow, pulling great gobs of nasty off of the anchor before I finished hauling it in, and I thought, "I wish I had a flashlight. A headlamp would be even better ... Wait ... I packed a headlamp! Go, me!" Packing planning success! Woohoo! (I didn't actually GET the headlamp, but I'll have it tomorrow. If I remember.)

I failed in one respect, though: ramen noodles. I love ramen noodles. Love them. I could eat them every single day. Not the fresh kind, although they're plenty good, but the cheap little packages of dried noodles found in every supermarket in the US. (During our vegan phase a few years ago, I discovered that the Top Ramen Oriental flavor didn't have any meat products, so now I'm partial to that one. Obviously, we didn't try veganism for health reasons.) I realized yesterday that I didn't bring nearly enough ramen noodles. Fortunately, we made it today to Neah Bay, our last stop before Hawaii, and I managed to find a few more packages in the little marina store. Disaster averted.

Jason and I both had some doubts yesterday about whether turning back and tucking in overnight was a mistake, but our passage today was so much smoother that we're comfortable with the decision. We have to remember that while we definitely want to make it to Hawaii, we're not racing anyone, and it's much more important to us that we're comfortable and enjoying the trip. Aside from my ongoing seasickness (see the Saltines below), I think we're succeeding.

What we ate yesterday:
breakfast: cinnamon rolls
lunch: Tostitos Hint of Lime
dinner: chicken cacciatore and Caesar salad

Today's menu:
breakfast: oatmeal
lunch: Saltines for me, mac & cheese for everyone else
supper: linguine with pesto

As we were unpacking yesterday, we were all teasing Grace because she brought four pairs of shoes, which is absolutely ridiculous. I also have four pairs, but mine are perfectly reasonable. I have rain boots, because we're on a boat and things get wet. I have boat sneakers, because they have non-skid soles and someone I know told me a gory story about a particularly horrifying injury that someone received when he was sailing to Hawaii and not wearing shoes. I have flip-flops, because we're going to Hawaii. And I have shoes to wear on the flight home, because I would lose all self-respect if I wore any of those other shoes. (I'm not usually opposed to flip-flops, but after three weeks at sea, my bare feet might frighten people. I don't want to risk it.)

I took a lot of pictures to share our living quarters today, but it turns out there's no cellular service up here in the middle of nowhere, so we're switching over to satellite service and don't have the bandwidth. Sorry. You'd all have loved seeing the library and the gym and the master bath, where you can take a shower while you're sitting on the toilet for maximum efficiency.

Tomorrow, we finally head out into the open ocean!

Lessons

Somehow, in the middle of all of our planning and preparations, we all failed to realize that this is a holiday weekend. It's not just any holiday, either, it's Memorial Day, which is when all the people whose boats have been sitting in the marinas all winter long head out on the water. Apparently, it's also the weekend of a huge annual fishing derby at Neah Bay, where we were planning to stop one last time -- without a reservation -- before we head out to sea. The whole marina is booked, with a waiting list. Oops. 

Luckily, we didn't make it that far, anyway! We cast off our lines just after 4:30 this morning and had peaceful, calm waters to usher us out of Elliott Bay. We made it to the Strait of Juan de Fuca before we hit some rough water, getting rougher...and the forecast changed to gale force winds through tonight. I was lying flat on my back, vowing not to be sick, trying to decide if this was actually fun or not, and thinking of things that would be less fun (getting eaten by tigers, snow-skiing naked) or more fun (lying on a beach in the sunshine, not being seasick), and Grace was sitting in the cockpit turning green, when Jason decided to TURN AROUND and head back to quieter water. I knew I loved him. Now we're peacefully anchored in a quiet little bay off of Port Townsend. We're going to wait out the weather and try again tomorrow morning. My little family is happy out on the deck of the boat. 

Survival at Sea

I don't know a lot about survival at sea, and I'm hoping not to learn anything else. We have every safety device known to man, and it's now all set up and ready to use.

We all have leashes to tie ourselves to the boat if the water is rough, and tags to wear on our life jackets that will set off an alarm if we fall overboard. We're taking shifts so that someone is awake and on watch 24 hours a day. Jason and I split the overnight duty (he's got 11pm-3am, I'll have 3am-7am), and we'll each be doing our shifts alone, but the girls will be taking theirs together during the day. We also have an emergency beacon that will send our location to the Coast Guard if needed. And of course, we have a satellite phone and modem, so we can watch funny cat videos online if things get really bad.

Our life raft will automatically explode out of its case and inflate if it hits the water. I'm imagining that would be pretty neat to watch, except that if it happens, I'm unlikely to be sitting nearby with a bucket of popcorn. It's really heavy and awkward, and we had a couple of near misses while we were perfecting the installation. If Jason hadn't been nearby to catch it, we would have had a few chances to see it explode. It's strapped tightly to the back of the boat now, though, and I'm hoping it will stay there forever.

I'm a little bit of a weirdo about preparing for our survival of an apocalypse, so we had a few weeks of emergency MREs at home in a secret hiding place, and we've taken those to bring on the life raft with us. We could survive for a while with those, as long as the megalodon shark doesn't get us first. 

We also have survival suits (and my Halloween costume for next year). Those suckers are a little strange. 

There are four sizes: Child, Intermediate Adult, Adult, and Jumbo (the brands differ a little bit in the specific size names and limits, but they're all pretty similar). They encase your body completely, so they all have weight ranges and maximum height limits, and you don't want to get one that's too small. The Child size is for weights from 44-110lbs. That would fit three of us, but the maximum height is 4'2". We're all too tall! That never happens! So we're all going for Intermediate Adult, which fits weights 110-180 lbs, and heights up to 5'8". Jason gets to be a normal Adult (110-330 lbs, up to 6'3"). Jumbo is over 220lbs or 6'3". They all come in handy little carrying bags with instructions for putting them on correctly. ("If time permits, remove shoes...put non-dominant arm in, then hood, then other arm...Relax. You can not sink.") 

Our most important survival technique involves a little competition. If the girls argue, Jason and I get to give them a point on our scoreboard. If we're arguing, we get a point. When we get to Hawaii, the team with the fewest points gets to take the first hot showers. I'm totally winning this one, as long as I can get everyone else to understand the rules. I had to explain last night that the contest doesn't begin until we're actually on the boat. Arguments on shore do NOT count. I'm getting them out of my system while I still can.

Sailing: A Love Story

It's surprising to me how many people ask if I'm really okay with going on this trip. A lot (a LOT) of people seem to think that I only agreed to go to make Jason happy, but that's not really right. I do want him to be happy, and it's true that the trip was his idea, but the conversation went like this:

Jason: I think we should sail our boat to Hawaii.

Me: Okay. When?

He didn't have to persuade me. I'm the reason our family flew through the air with the greatest of ease, went ice climbing with axes and crampons, rode bikes through Japanese rice paddies. In fact, the reason we're sailing at all is that I wanted to learn how a few years ago. I'm the one who'll be hanging from the top of the mast in the middle of the ocean if there's a problem. I may not look like much, but on the inside, beneath the curly hair and the knobby knees, I'm a beast. I'm burly and brave and tough. (Yes, I do know what those words mean.) I don't usually go around telling everyone these things (at least not until now), but Jason knows me. He certainly knows that I'm brave enough to tell him if I don't want to do something.

I love sailing. I love it even more on simpler boats than ours. I love the sound of the water rushing below the boat. I love when our boat is heeling over the water, zipping along because we've harnessed power of the wind. We've harnessed the power of the wind! That's a glorious, godlike feeling. I find charts fascinating, I think Morse code is cool, and I can't wait to compare my sextant readings to our GPS coordinates. Jason would like a bigger boat; I'd like a smaller one. If I had my way about it, we'd probably spend a couple of years sailing around the world on a homemade raft, navigating only by the stars. (We'd have to tow a barge for all of our food, but that's a separate issue.)

I'm not scared about going on this trip. I'm excited. The things that really frighten me (grumpy people, cockroaches, tardiness) aren't going to be out on the water with us. We're both moderately intelligent people and competent sailors. If something happens to Jason, I'm not going to throw my hands in the air and just drift around aimlessly until we die. I'll have a good cry, eat some chips, trim the sails, and keep going. My expectation, though, is that I'll be able to spend my shifts eating the chips, trimming the sails, and enjoying the journey.

Provisioning

(Or, how neurotic can one person be?) 

We'll leave Seattle on the morning of Friday, May 22, head north through Puget Sound, and then west in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We're planning to use our motor, not our sails, for most of this portion of the trip, so when we get to Neah Bay, right before we meet the Pacific Ocean, we'll refuel and wait for good weather to head out into open water. From there, we'll hoist the sails and head south along the west coast of the US, bearing west when the winds change direction. After we leave Neah Bay, we won't stop until we make it to Hilo, on the big island. Our intention is to fly back to Seattle on June 14.

Part of what all of that means is that when we leave on May 22, we'll need to have everything we're going to use until June 14. That's 24 days. That's a lot of food. (And a lot of books. And a lot of toilet paper.) This post will tell you about our provisioning, but it'll probably tell you more about my freaky weirdness. Yay. Fun times ahead.

I'm packing a few different options for breakfasts (oatmeal, cereal and milk boxes, eggs) and lunches (macaroni & cheese, ramen noodles, peanut butter and rice cakes). I'm hoping we'll all be able to eat most of those meals together, but everyone will be responsible for choosing -- and preparing! -- their own food. We're going to make an even stronger effort to have dinner together every evening, and I've mapped out a menu for that. I've planned every dinner for our trip, and I tried to space things out so that we won't have meals with the same proteins or the same "flavor family" too close together. (No two consecutive nights of Mexican meals, for example.) I can recognize that this might be ridiculous, but I can't seem to help myself. I was hoping I could also avoid having too much carb repetition, but those are going to be mostly rice and pasta, so it's hard to keep that from getting boring. I also have to store things within the limits of a 12-cubic-inch freezer, a dorm-sized refrigerator, and the various other random spaces on the boat. I've started freezing a few things to make things a little easier, but still, we'll be opening a lot of boxes and cans.

I don't know how much the boat will be rolling around on any given day, and I don't want to have to dig through lots of stuff to find what I need, so I've numbered all of the ingredients for each meal, and  as much as possible, I'll be storing them together by day number. I've got plastic boxes to store things so that it all stays nice and dry and contained. We'll be using the same boxes to store the garbage when we're finished eating. Right now, I've only got about a quarter of the food we'll need, and the sheer volume is already overwhelming.

Finally: snacks and confessions. Confession #1: I get seasick. Sometimes I can overcome it with my superhuman mind power, but when that fails, I'm a firm believer in the healing powers of Tostitos Hint of Lime. I can usually knock out about a bag a day, but frankly, 24 full-sized bags sounds excessive even to me. Confession #2: I really, really don't like sharing my food, even with my own children, especially when that food is in limited supply. I'm trying to decide if I can manage with only 12 bags, and if so, where I can hide them all so only I know where they are. This is difficult. The boat's not that big. The runner-up seasickness cure is Distler's Fiery Pretzels. These come in 2-ounce bags, so I've just placed an order for 48 of those. That might be enough to survive. Maybe. Stay tuned.

One month from now...

This summer, we're going to sail from Seattle to Hawaii. We expected to be completely out of touch, but we've had a few requests for updates, so we've decided to keep a blog for people to follow our progress and be reassured that we haven't all drowned. At the very least, we'll try to post our location every few days. Our departure date is May 22. 

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I'm giving answers to some of the questions we're asked often, but if you want to know something we haven't answered here, let us know! 

Who's going? Just the four of us: Jason, Polly, Grace, and Nora. Polly will be doing most of the blog posts. When she's barfing over the side of the boat, Jason will take over. We're told it takes about three days for the seasickness to abate, so...we'll see.

Are you taking a crew? No. It's just the four of us.

How old are your kids? Grace is fourteen and Nora is twelve.

What kind of boat do you have? Pensive is a 43-foot Beneteau. We've added a watermaker, solar panels, and a wind generator, along with a few other luxuries like a life raft and some man-overboard beacons. Let's hope we don't need those.

Why is it named Pensive? In the Harry Potter books, Professor Dumbledore has a Pensieve, a vessel that stores his memories. We thought it sounded like a good name, but we changed the spelling. I'm not sure why.

Why are you doing this? Why not? It was Jason's idea, and we all thought it sounded like fun.

Have you done anything like this before? Not really. We've sailed before, of course, but not on an ocean voyage. 

How long will it take you? About three weeks. We think. We're just hoping to get to Hawaii. We've hired someone to bring the boat home for us.

What are you going to eat? Spam, ramen noodles, and tortilla chips. We also have espresso, tequila, and chocolate milk. (Just kidding. Kind of. We don't really have tequila. It's an alcohol-free trip. Other than that, we're going to try to eat as normally as possible, although we realize that fresh produce might be hard to find. I'm trying to prep and freeze as much as I can before we leave. Our freezer is about 12 cubic inches, though, so we'll see how well that works.) 

How will you do laundry? Seriously? We're alone on a BOAT. In the OCEAN. If our clothes get really filthy, we'll just take them off. We do plan to shower before we fly home. You're welcome, fellow passengers.