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