The sailing today was, in a word, Zoom. Zoomy, zoomy, zoom, zoom. Tina clocked us doing over 12knots SOG this morning, but I suspect the GPS was broken. However, solid 8 knots all day for sure.

What else? We smell better.

It was a water making, laundry and showers day today. How do we make water?! We run the generator (burning diesel), which sucks salt water out of the sea and pushes it through a very very fine filter (finer than salt molecules), it spits the extra salty water over the side and spits the fresh water into our tanks. We then use the fresh water to wash clothes, dishes, ourselves and drink – all of which ultimately ends up down the drain and back in the sea. So, in a strange kind of way all the water maker really does is turn diesel into people who aren’t thirsty and smell good. Yay.

Nothing else happened today! Nothing. Well, Tina saw a turtle and cooked dinner (unrelated). Jon caught a Mahi-mahi and watched Iron Man with Teo, Mia finished her book and cooked lunch, Teo did some school and played a math card game with Jon. So basically nothing, the days are starting to run together!

We also joined another fleet of boats! What is a fleet of boats and how do you join it, glad you asked! Basically, there is a nice lady on a boat sailing somewhere between Panama and the Marquesas. Everyday, she collects all the emails she gets from other boats, she gathers together all the details of where the boats are and any interesting news, including weather, fishing, technical problems, what they ate, etc. and then sends a summary back around to the all the other boats.

Well, that is M-Fleet and they are mostly ahead of us. But today we found out about another fleet of many kids boats who are mostly behind us, so from tomorrow we’ll be sending our position to two lists of yacht spread between Panama and French Polynesia. My guesstimate is that there must be about 30 boats between these two fleets and likely the same again which aren’t listed but out there ‘nearby’. So over 50 boats around here somewhere. But there is a lot of somewhere out here.

4000 miles, that’s how far we are sailing. What is 4000 miles? It’s London to India. Oslo to Florida. LA to Japan. Longer than the cape of good hope to cape horn. A lot of somewhere.

But still we were passed last night a British registered super yacht ‘Rosehearty’ – 150ft long according to our AIS and headed the same way, albeit twice as fast. Mia wanted us to call them up and explain we needed Tea and crumpets, and to watch the royal wedding on satellite TV but we didn’t, it was late.

Did I mention that we all feel very lucky to have such good sailing weather? Well well do.

Another blisteringly fast day on Itchy Foot. Yet again we had 15kn of wind on the port quarter (not on the side, nor on the stern, somewhere in-between) and Itchy Foot loved it. This point of sail is called a ‘Broad Reach’ and is usually the fastest for our sort of boat, Itchy Foot is no exception. Over the next few days the wind will work its way farther behind us until we are going more of less dead downwind, which is slower and less comfortable, but for now we’re lovin’ it.

Speaking of Lovin’ It! – did you know that 40% of MacDonald’s sales come from Happy Meals?! We didn’t but do now, because it was Quiz Day today! Tina once again provided an hour of entertainment in the form of a quiz, with challenging questions for all onboard including a Star Wars and Harry Potter section. Mia as usually won the most points in the music section, the final blow coming when Jon confused Grease with Pulp Fiction – it would have been worse if he had been picking the next family movie night. Not even the Poetry Round could save Jon and Mia penned the perfect tear jerker about Teo to win the judges hearts and points.

Tina has also taken over the role of Itchy Foot bread baker, and is baking a fresh loaf everyday during her night watch. Lunch never tasted so good, especially as Mia had the good idea to pair it with the last of our fresh vegetables and make a Pumpkin Soup to go with. We’re down to a couple of green pepper, a bunch of apples and plenty of potatoes as we go into our last 10 days. Thankfully we haven’t touched the food in the freezer yet and Jon keeps catching fish – four bites today – two got away and two Mahi-mahi are now in the freezer. So dinner was pan fried yellow fin tuna and buttery potato mash. Oh and Teo is a fan of the Orep Cheese Cake – as you can see from the photo.

Not much else to report. Mia is upset she missed a royal wedding and wants to know all about the dress. Any descriptions and wedding gossip would be greatly appreciated at jonwright@myiridium.net – no photos please!

After the bright colours, songs and celebrations of yesterday, today felt a little sombre. Over night on the 17th we did a lot of motoring, there simply wasn’t enough wind to sail and bobbing around a night it not good for morale – at least motoring gives the boat some stability and a kinder motion for sleeping.

The morning was better, Tina was on the first daylight watch and reported nice sailing, calm seas and plenty of wind so we buzzed along at 7 knots and everyone else slept in. Teo was up next, with Mia close behind. Teo in the morning is the perfect addition to this boat and our family, he is not quick to life, preferring to ease into the day gently and so long as a bowl of cereal is forthcoming fairly promptly he is usually church mouse quiet. In fact, there is a good chance he’ll be pretending to be a mouse or some other cute creature, at the moment he is a ‘crystal critter’ from Star Wars. Anyway, no screaming, running, singing or anything else offensive comes from the little man until the sun is well up.

As soon as Jon stuck his head out of bed the wind died and on went the motor. Then it came back a touch, and died again. The main problem with light wind is not actually going too slowly, we’re not in a hurry and if you plan to cross oceans at a brisk walking pace, then travelling at a shopping mall stroll isn’t much different. No, problem is the damage that light winds do to sails. Sails like to be full and stay full, not to fill and collapse, fill and collapse… and while they are collapsed rub against the wire rigging. The solution is a switching to a lighter sail which can fill with lighter airs, in this case our spinnaker!

We have a spinnaker onboard, it doesn’t get a lot of action being a bit of a beast to handle but today looked good. Tina and Jon started by digging out all the necessary lines, blocks, sails and other bits and bobs from the forepeak. Then we started to rig it all up, attach blocks for turning lines, run the lines, untwist things, put the pole up etc. etc. Before we started Jon made two predictions, firstly that the whole process would take an hour and secondly that when it was ready the wind would have built to be too much to fly this light sail. Right on both counts!

But at least we were sailing, albeit with the spinnaker still on deck ready to go. After an hour or so the wind died again and the was our chance, so Mia and Tina on the winches and Jon managing the ‘sock’ up she went and pretty she was too. After a bit of tweaking we were making 5.5kn under spinnaker alone – good enough for lunch and medals.

During lunch we noticed that a squall line was building behind us, which would bring both rain and more worryingly too much wind. So a hasty bite to eat and down came the spinnaker just before the rain and wind hit hard. We switched the spinnaker for a headsail alone and all went down below with the hatches closed for a favourite board game followed by a movie, as it somewhat traditional on Itchy Foot rainy days.

Not much else to report for the day, we didn’t celebrate half-way as it didn’t feel like a celebration kind of day, tomorrow looks better. We continue our journey West, as all the other directions seem longer.

The 17th of May was always a favourite day back home in Oslo. It is Norway’s national day, or birthday if you like and it is a day celebrated with great pride, warmth, openness and good spirits.

Our traditions back home followed a similar pattern each year. Being old farts we didn’t go out and get hammered on the night of the 16th (traditional). So the celebrations started for us on the morning of the 17th. Firstly, we would dress in our finest, neither of us owning the traditional Norwegian national costume we would dress in Sunday best suits and pretty summer dresses accordingly. We normally hosted a champagne breakfast for a few close friends to enjoy a slap-up breakfast and bubbles would flow. After that we walked down town, to the kings palace amount the throngs of people also dressed to the nines, waving flags and praying for a nice spring day.

A procession of marching bands would troop past the king and along the main street of Oslo, as the sidewalks were lined with cheering, hot dog eating, flag waving families. After the bands cleared out we would find a nice park to sit in with friends, or if the weather was less enticing a balcony or living room of a friend. Champagne would continue to flow, along with cakes of all shapes, sizes and colours. This continued until the early evening when we would pick our way homeward to get out of our finest and wind down the evening resting feet that don’t normally see dress shoes and need to be up on the sofa.

So, how do we achieve this on Itchy Foot?! It wasn’t easy but between us we had a good stab at it.

The morning started slowly, no champagne breakfast this time, with Jon taking school with Teo and Mia and Tina taking watch and choosing outfits for the day. Just before lunch Jon started making, if you ask him, the most importantly part of the 17th of May; the cakes. First up, separating the egg whites for the Kransekake, not easy when the eggs are 15 days old and the yokes and the whites start to run together – they are still perfectly safe to eat (boy can you tell when they aren’t) but impossible to separate. So, lunch quickly became scrambled eggs on toast (all the eggs that wouldn’t separate) and eight eggs later Jon had separate out two whites.

After lunch the cake making continued. Thanks to a lovely couple we met in Vista Mar Marina (Becca and John from Halcyon) we had some almonds onboard. For Kransekake you combine equal weights ground almonds and icing sugar with a little bit of flour. Then stir in whisked egg whites until it gets to be a dry but workable texture. Now, where did we put the Kransekake rings?! Never fear we’ll make some out of aluminium foil. Roll into cigar sized sticks, put in tinfoil forms and then bake in the oven for 12 minutes at 200C. Then allow to rest for an hour and they are frankly amazing with a cup of coffee.

Next cake!

Oreo No-bake Cheesecake! Thanks for Nahanni land support and to Tina’s mum for getting a few recipes online and emailing them to us. Life savers. This one was easy. Crush the Oreo cookies, spoon some into the bottom of ramekins (or jars in our case). Then mix a packet of cream cheese with a can of condensed milk…. wait…. Jon threw out the can of condensed milk as it looked like it was rusting. Oh, wait. How about just adding less water to powdered milk and then keep adding sugar until it tastes right? Yup, that works. So combine the cream cheese with the ‘condensed milk’ and stir in a bunch of ground Oreo cookies. Pour over the top and then stick the jar in the fridge until you are ready to devour.

After getting dressed in our finest – Jon found a lovely piece of red webbing we had spare which made a perfect tie – we enjoy coffee and Kransekake. Then turn up the Ah-ha music and parade around the deck waving our homemade flags. The sun was starting to set and the sea was calm, beautiful. Tina made a lovely evening meal and we decided that we had reached our cake limit for the day and so the cheese cakes will wait until tomorrow.

We miss many things from Noway. Good friends, the beautiful country, a cosy apartment, going to concerts, music day, the 17th of May to name but a few. It was a bitter sweet treat to have such a warm reminder of a place we call home.

Nothing much else to report from the day, the winds were on the light side, but we still made around 5-6 knots on average. The sea is calmer now and even Teo commented on how much easier life in onboard when the waves calm down. We continue on our rhumb line course to our destination and tomorrow I think we’ll celebrate our half-way mark. The champagne is already in the fridge chilling.

We bumped into another yacht out here today, thankfully not literally. Around lunchtime we get a call on the normally silent VHF ‘Itchy Foot, Itchy Foot this is Miki, Miki, Miki’. Replying to their hail we discover it is a Norwegian yacht that left Panama a few weeks ago and are also on their way to the Marquesas. They are a little shorter and a little slower than us, plus they got unlucky with the wind so we managed to catch them up and pass them throughout the day.

After a quick glance through the binoculars and a zoomed into photo Jon figured out they are an older Hallberg Rassy, which he was sure we’d seen somewhere before. We called them again and exchanged some more detailed. Sure enough, and by chance, we’d seen them transiting the
Panama canal the day we visited the museum at the Gutan Locks, we even have a few photos of them figuring that there was a chance we’d see them down the line.

We talked a little more, exchanged contact details and satellite phone numbers incase we needed to contact someone nearby. And finally talked about our plans for the 17th of May – which is Norway’s birthday and national day – a huge celebration back home. Our preparation started today with Mia, Tina and Teo all sitting down to make Norwegian flags to decorate Itchy Foot. We sent off a few emails to get recipes for different traditional cakes which Jon will try to put together in the morning – assuming we have the necessary ingredients onboard. And maybe in the afternoon we’ll grill some hotdogs, which again is a very common thing for the kids to eat on the 17th.

Another fast day sailing today, we spent most the day zooming along at 7.5knots. The seas are starting to build and get higher which isn’t helping the comfort onboard and they are forecast to get larger still. This makes simple jobs like brushing teeth, eating, preparing food, even going to sleep, much harder than normal and leads to frustration.

The good news is that we’ll be celebrating the half way mark tomorrow, so double celebration! It’s not a precise half-way and the total time left maybe less or more than what we’ve done so far. We don’t sail in the straight lines as the wind, waves and currents don’t always permit or encourage straight lines, so we’ve been working on the idea that the crossing is about 4000 miles. Tomorrow we should have 2000 left on the rhumb line to our destination. Hopefully we’ll be able to sail the rhumb (direct) line for most of the remaining trip.

From noon till noon on day 13/14 we sailed about 165 miles (straight line between the two points). So divide 2000 miles by 165 and you get a little over 12 days. But that is optimistic and 140 miles a day is a little more our normal pace which gives closer to 14 days. Again, assuming a straight line and no shortage of wind, neither of which is a given.

On we go.

The last ocean crossing we completed was the Cape Verde to Barbados, and it took 14 days, so we would have arrived today. For the Pacific we are still debating if we are half way there or not! If we’re lucky the answer is yes, continued good wind and conditions should see us arriving in French Polynesia in about 14 to 16 days time so almost half way. Though of course, French Polynesia is barely half way across the Pacific!

Last night we had a few strange encounters; from the moment the sunset we stated to see a strange glow over the horizon. The glow was bright white and illuminated the clouds in the sky in the direction we were headed. Nothing showed on AIS and so we were confused but kept out a cautious eye on the horizon as we sailed west. Shorty after midnight lights started to appear and it became clear we were looking at a huge commercial fishing ship. This thing was vast, finally it showed up on AIS (one of our system to seeing other ships) and it was 600ft long and not alone. By the end of the night we counted seven of them, festooned with floodlights, almost stationary in the water and hauling in huge fishing nets. Judging from their names it was clear they were a large commercial fishing fleet out of China. By the time I came on watch at 6am they were safely behind us and the wind was increasing.

In a word, today was FAST. Fairly much all day from the moment the sun came up we were zooming along, never once dropping our speed below 6.5kns and most of the day was between 7..5 and 8 knots which is blisteringly fast for little old Itchy Foot.

Before lunch Jon caught and landed a Yellow Fin Tuna. It was one of the most beautiful fishes we’ve seen, almost too pretty to kill it. The fishing tips from family, friends and other sailors were put to good use and they seemed to have helped. With fish for lunch, dinner and a couple of lbs of Tuna in the freezer we took in the lines and Jon took the rest of the day off from fishing – it was too fast anyway!

Another quiet day on Itchy Foot. Jon baked bread and cake after lunch before settling on the sofa to watch the latest star wars with Teo. Mia continued with her bunting project and Tina seemed to be relaxing with music, journaling and keeping watch much of the day. We put the clocks back an hour at noon today, so we are GMT -6 on Itchy Foot – the same time as San Jose in Costa Rica. We don’t really need to do this, but it helps keep the watches aligned with the day and night periods – so night watches start when it gets dark for example.

Oh and on a positive note, the diesel spill on the deck seems much better than feared and from initial inspection the staining seem to be minimal. It doesn’t sound like we do much on Itchy Foot, but your’d be amazed how the days fill with little jobs and tasks.

The average frequency of some minor disaster on cruising yacht is about one a week. We don’t have any real numbers to back that up, and not all weeks are equal, but 50 big problems a year sounds about right. So we were overdue.

In the middle of hanging out washing, Jon detected a smell of diesel in the air, on closer examination the deck around the diesel jerry cans we keep on deck was wet. No problem, that part of the deck is often wet from splashing waves. Only it wasn’t splashy today and it wasn’t water. A quick dip and sniff of a finger and oh bugger, it’s diesel.

It is at this point that those of you who have ever owned a teak deck yacht have put down your cup of coffee, put your head in your hands and mouthed your preferred expletive. Cos you know how much of a nightmare this is going to be to get out of the wood.

We soaked up what we could with rags, found the offending jerry can with a crack and then syphoned the remaining diesel from the can into our main fuel tanks below decks. With that can cleaned up and unable to cause more damage we started to try to clean up the deck. The good news about diesel is that it doesn’t just burst into flames, so there was no danger from the spill. The problem with diesel is that, unlike a highly refined fuel, it is very dirty so even when the fuel evaporates off it leaves behind a lot of dirt which has soaked into the wood.

About an hour of absorbing, soaping, washing, rinsing, soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, repeating later we have deck port side of the boat which is wet and still smells of diesel. Being quiet late in the afternoon at this point there wasn’t time for the sun to dry the decks and for us to have have a look at the damage done before it got dark. We’ll see in the morning.

Other than that, the day was a good one. Jon found that the answer to how to successfully land a fish came from just sending out the email asking for help – in rather the same way that calling IT support immediately causes the problem to resolve itself. So yes, after a couple that got away this morning we managed to land a nice big (20lb maybe) dorado. This all happened around lunchtime so rather than sushi for lunch we had it for dinner. Very nice it was too. And plenty left for Tina to cook something fishy for dinner tomorrow night.

Thanks to both Jon’s uncle Malcolm and Mia’s old school friend Kris for tips on what we doing wrong when it comes to landing the fish. As you both independently said exactly the some thing we’ll give your advice a shot the next time we hook something, hopefully tomorrow.

In other news, Teo finished his LEGO Y-bomber from star wars, which everyone agreed is completely amazingly awesome. It’s also great to know that he is perfectly able to follow the instruction for the 8-14 age bracket LEGO now which opens up mountains of the really cool sets. His dad in now plotting to buy all the other cool star wars LEGO, for Teo of course.

Mia continued with her bunting project and managed to enlist the help of Tina, so together they have made major progress, Itchy Foot may smell like a gas station forecourt but she’ll look dandy in the Pacific.

Help, they are getting away!

So we are starting to catch fish, or at least get bites, but we’re unable to land them on the boat. One way or another they are getting away. Here is a description of the situation.

We are running two lines from the back of Itchy Foot, one each side. We don’t use rods, preferring to attach the reels directly to the strong metal tuned rails on the back of the boat. These are two trolling reels, penn and shimano with several 100 meters of 120lb braided line on each. The last 100m is 150lb multicolored braided line which is easier to handle as it is larger diameter. At the end of that main line is a suitably rated swivel with a clasp. Then I attach on lure, which usually has about 3-5m of monofilament and then a squid type lure, about 10-15cm at the end with a correctly sized hook.

Now we are in waters with fish we are getting bites, about five or six a day, often both lines at the same time. And that is the point where I need help.

The ratchet on the reel goes zeeeeeeee and I know we have a bite. The line starts to spin out at a furious rate. So I increase the tension on the ratchet to slow the rate the line goes out without stopping it completely. Itchy Foot is likely doing at least 6kn at this point and so I’ve tried slowing her down to 3-4 knots before working the reel. I’ve also tried to bring them in at 6knots which is harder work.

Next I start to increase the resistance on the reel and try to pull in the fish. At some point in the next minute or so the line goes slack and the fish has gotten away. Basically I’m getting two minutes into what should be a longer fight and losing the fish off the lure. Nothing breaks, no snapped lines, no lost lures, just no fish on the end anymore.

So, ask the audience. If anyone has ideas or researching a little for me I would be very grateful. I can not read your comments here, not on the blog nor on Facebook until we get to land, which would be a little late. However we can receive email and I’ll give the address at the bottom. Please no links, no photos, just plain text in the emails or I won’t be able to download them. Remember the speed of the internet in 1994? I wish it was that fast. Imagine 2400 baud modem, that is what I have. So text only please.

Mail tips and morale support to jonwright@myiridum.net

Any and all helpful advisors will receive an unsigned photo of us eating sushi.

Many thanks!
Jon and the hungry crew of Itchy Foot.