You’ll Find us Chasing the Sun

Friday June 14, 2013

Our first night on passage, we went easy on Nate and let him sleep through the night without the interruption of shifts since he had just set foot on a sailboat for the first time only five hours beforehand, and we weren’t about to leave him alone at the wheel in the dark.  Or autopilot, whatever.  I was on my morning watch when he finally woke up around 8 and joined me in the cockpit.  Asking him how he slept, he replied that it felt like he was constantly up, the only way he was even able to tell that he’d gotten any sleep was that every time he’d look over at mine & Matt’s bunk, a new one of us would be asleep there.  He may have laughed the previous night when he’d asked what one does on passage, and I replied with “Sleep, or count down the hours until you can sleep again”, but before he could even spend 30 minutes awake with me, he was promptly passed out in the cockpit, napping for the next two hours.  Matt was finally beginning to stir around this time as well, and now that it was daylight hours, agreed that we could raise the main.  We hadn’t done it the previous night since our course was putting us almost directly downwind and we’d need to go wing’n’wing, using the spinnaker pole to secure the headsail to one side.  Nate, trying to be a helpful crew member, kept asking what he could do to help, but it was really only a two person job anyway.  Although I think he thoroughly served his purpose just by being on the boat, and when I let the main out a little to quickly and almost knocked Matt off the boat with the boom, was saved a severe screaming since Matt didn’t want to cause a scene in front of an almost stranger.  There was still a look of death, but it’s much easier to ignore by just looking the other way.

Georgie is just having so much fun.

The rest of day one was divided up between the three of us by reading books and taking naps.  With a scopoalmine patch on, my stomach was actually settled enough for me to pick up a book for once, so I decided to start ‘Maiden Voyage’, which has been sitting on our bookshelf for over a year.  I was two or three chapters in when I went to make lunch for us all (out of one of my worst loaves of bread ever), and came back up to find that Matt had stolen the book from me.  I was actually quite alright with this since it meant the Nook was open for the taking, and brought up ‘A Brief History of Nearly Everything’ to keep me occupied for the rest of the trip.  I don’t know if it was the added bonus of finally being able to read on passage again, or the novelty of having another person aboard, even if we were all doing our own thing, but before I knew it the sun was dipping down in the sky and it was time for dinner and sundowners.  Passing everyone a cold Red Stripe, we enjoyed the spaghetti I had prepared the previous day, and even though I think Matt’s eating habits are on par with mine, Nate made sure to mention how he’d never seen such orange spaghetti before in his life.  Ok, so maybe the grease of the ground beef mixed a little oddly with the Ragu, but it was still edible…right?  And probably much better than the only other option…Cup-o-Noodles.

 The lee cloth is doing it’s job of keeping Nate in his bunk……mostly.

Thursday brought even more excitement…in the form of movies.  I don’t know why the two of us never thought of it before, but when I started moving around the cabin without actually getting sick I thought ‘Hey!  I probably have enough energy to actually hook in all the necessary components to get the tv working, and then I can plop down on the settee for two hours of entertainment.  As strange as it sounds, I think I’d never actually done it before because I felt bad for leaving Matt up in the cockpit alone on watch while enjoyed the movie, but he was so engrossed in his book that he didn’t mind.   For the next two days we kept the movies rolling and introduced Nate to such cinema classics as The Proposal, The Adjustment Bureau, and Hot Tub Time Machine.  I think he was very impressed with the two TB of movies and tv shows that our hard drive houses.  After the first movie played, everyone would join in on viewing, with the scheduled ‘watch’ person poking their head out of the companionway every 10-15 minutes to conclude that we were still surrounded by water and nothing else.  Popcorn was popped, very poorly, and it was a nice distraction from the fact that we were actually traveling.

Friday afternoon we were all getting antsy though and ready to make landfall.  For awhile we had hoped that we’d be to Utila by Friday night since there was a period our speeds were shooting up, but then we realized we were going to fall short and get there in the middle of the night, meaning we had to slow ourselves down enough so that we wouldn’t arrive before daylight.  I tell you, nothing slashes spirits more than the hope of getting somewhere early and then finding out it’s not going to happen.  Later in the evening though, we were treated to some building seas and winds blowing over 30.  The sky held promises of storms that we prepared for by strapping on life vest and gathering in the cockpit, but each time we saw a wall of water coming our way, it would divert at the last minute and we were in the clear.  The skies finally started to clear around sunset and we prepared ourselves for bed, trying to sleep away the last agonizingly long hours of the passage.

 Nate, playing with Georgie while waiting for our non-storm.