Murre and the Pacific

I’ve made a number of changes to Murre over the last few weeks: rebuilt the wind vane, added an inner forestay for a storm jib, re-rigged the genoa pole, re-“thunk” spinnaker deployment, added chain and a new, BRUCE-type anchor to the bow, installed lee cloths for a sleeping berth in the main cabin, etc. What’s more, none of my radio communications equipment works when in a marina (the close proximity of other sailboat masts create too much interference). Thus, since it’s important all these systems work, better to test them in Bahia de La Paz than on the big blue. So we departed Marina Palmira yesterday for a two day, very local cruise.

I can report that the rebuilt vane works and works wonderfully. Besides remaining afloat and mobile, wind-driven directional stability is of prime importance to our cruising success, and a test on all points of sail, including straight downwind, wing and wing (light wind, no swell at all) showed the device in good working order. It still squeaks though.

That was yesterday. Today I redid the lee cloth install in the morning (small jobs can take forever) and then in the afternoon and just as the lovely Coromuel died right away I raised the spinnaker. Just my luck, I thought. I had wanted to raise the spinnaker in light wind, not NO wind. But true to form, within ten minutes the southerly had become a northerly and soon Murre was making two knots in a five knot breeze. What joy to be slipping through the water on a zephyr barely qualified to lift a daisy seed. What joy, except our heading was the beach. So I also learned that my 40 year old, symmetrical, “racing” spinnaker being flown as if it were an asymmetrical, cruising spinnaker will allow points of sail just shy of the beam.

And the radio. Many of the boats already on the way to the Marquesas are in radio contact. They’ve formed a loose network and meet at regular times. I am one of the last boats to leave, so the prospect of contacting front runners for weather is appealing. At anchor last night I could only faintly make out net control (the boat that moderates the larger conversation) but I heard DON QUIXOTE, a catamaran that recently departed Mexico, discuss twenty knot winds and large seas from the northwest. “The bar is dropping and we have cloud cover, but we’re hoping for a quiet night,” he said in a tone of voice suggesting he knew his hope was futile. Tonight net control is still faint, as are many of the reporters, until a woman’s voice booms in. She is on a boat at 11 degrees north and 122 degrees west, roughly 1000 miles southwest of Cabo San Lucas. No wind: six foot swell from the south. So its a mixed bag.

And I wanted to test this, this post. Most of my communications over the next several months will be over single sideband radio, including blog posts. What you are reading right now was sent from the middle of the bay. Did it work? I don’t have internet access, so you tell me.

A Coromuel whines in the rigging as I write. The night sky is without a moon, but the stars are no brighter for it. Orion is setting in the west, a proud warrior severed by a horizon I cannot see and pierced by the bright strobe from the local power plant. We depart in four days. It gives one pause.

Good Bye SPOT, Hello YOTREPS

Family and a few friends were kind enough to gift me a tracking device, SPOT, for my cruise south, a device that has allowed me to send ad hoc position reports to important people (the wife, the mother, the sister) and to attach photos and stories to these reports on the SPOT ADVENTURES site.

But SPOT’s coverage is not global. Even when Murre was bound from Mexico to Hawaii, there was likely going to be a middle period during which position reports were not possible. Now that the heading is decidedly south, SPOT will fail even sooner.

SPOT is not a passage maker’s solution.

Luckily there is an alternative, which goes by the acronym YOTREPS (I presume this means Yacht Offshore Transit Reports, but the site chooses not to explain). YOTREPS is a free service that displays participating yacht positions in a familiar map format in exchange for regular wind, sea, sky, barometric and temperature data from the yacht, data that is used to help verify and refine oceanic weather forecasting.

When not in a marina and thus beyond the reach of WIFI, Murre uses single sideband radio to communicate with shore. This technology allows voice communication with stations at great distance. Murre has heard news from China, game shows from Australia and has spoken with Oregon and El Salvador. When connected to a very slow and very loud modem on board, a modem I’ve attempted to quiet by sandwiching it on the bookshelf between Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Pablo Martinez’s “only true and accurate” History of Lower California, the radio allows me to send and receive simple, all-text emails via a network of global receiver stations managed by Sailmail.  And this is how I will tell YOTREPS, and you, where Murre is today.

The menu tab of this blog contains a header entitled Where is Murre? that links directly to Murre’s most recent position report.  Feel free to visit here as often as you like.

For those interested in exploring Yotreps or finding other boats in transit, start with the YOTREPS Reporting Boat List.   Boats are recorded here by name and YOTREPS ID number but are sorted by the ID number. Murre’s YOTREPS ID (her single sideband call sign) is WDF6383, so she‘s near the bottom of the list.  Click on the hyperlinked word “track” to be taken to position maps.  If you’d like more information, you can download the YOTREPS Reporter, which allows you to plot Murre’s position on a chart with the wind and sea state data I report. 

Though this is all new to me too, getting reports appears to be straightforward, more so, at least, than my reporting of them, which requires that I divide the sky into oktas (eighths)  in order to “count” cloud density, convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and think of wave height in meters.

Other Ways of Staying in Contact

Again, using the single sideband radio to transmit email and with a little luck I should be able to continue posting to this blog during passages.  So be sure to sign up for the feed.

Important Disclaimer 

For your own peace of mind DO NOT assume that my failure to post positions during a passage means that Murre or Randall are in trouble.  A number of things could be preventing me from reaching out: the computer fails, the radio fails, the sun is in the wrong position, land based stations aren’t taking my traffic, my batteries are dead, I’m too busy managing the ship, etc.  Though important, this communication mechanism is a luxury and will always be secondary to keeping Murre safe and on course.

Murre launched on her current adventure from San Francisco in November of 2010. She was headed south, to Mexico, down the Pacific coast of the Baja Peninsula, up into the Sea of Cortez, and into a rich cruising ground of indigo waters and tan desert islands that had captured my imagination for years. So complete was this incarceration that all of the articles I’ve posted to date on SPOT ADVENTURES have been under the title Murre in Mexico and none have discussed how boat and skipper would return home.

So let me catch you up.

From the Sea of Cortez there are two common routes north. One is affectionately called the “Baja Bash” by west coast cruisers; that is, switch on the motor and plow up the ragged coast against strong and stronger winds and seas supported by thousands of miles of fetch. Imagine, for example, walking from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the I5 freeway, against traffic; now delete from this image lane dividers and make the ground jump up and down. The ride is reported to be wet, rough, ridiculously unpleasant.

The other way home is via the historic “Great Circle” route, the track used by sailing ships of trade for thousands of years before the invention of that snotty upstart, the motor. Compared to the “Baja Bash” this passage is as leisurely as it is long. Take what wind there is out of Cabo San Lucas and follow it west, picking up the northeast trades to Hawaii in a week or so. From Hawaii shoot straight north on trades that soften as latitude increases; continue climbing up and up and around this ocean’s main weather feature, the North Pacific High, where northwesterlies eventually prevail and can be ridden to one’s destination.

While neither choice is fast in a modern sense, the “Baja Bash” passage is around 1600 miles and can be thought of in terms of weeks. To achieve the “Great Circle” route one must think in months: total distance traveled is at least 5000 miles and could easily require 50 days sailing, this without any dallying in Hawaii, a place that invites dallying.  Murre’s way home has always been via Hawaii.

But, in fact, there is a third route.

A few weeks ago I was sitting by the pool of a nice hotel in San Jose del Cabo with my lovely wife, Joanna. I put down my book, took an extra long pull on my margarita and ever so casually remarked that I’d been thinking of heading to Hawaii via French Polynesia. To which my wife immediately replied “why not!”. 

Current occupation to one side, I am actually the timid one in this relationship. I could think of a thousand reasons why not (too far, too long away, too expensive, not part of the agreement, too damned scary, etc.) and had been rehearsing answers to her objections for days, so I was entirely unprepared for no objection at all. I hadn’t imagined I’d see the gauntlet lying there at the foot of my chaise lounge smiling sweetly and purring like a kitten. All I had to do was pick it up.

So I did.

The nearest approach to French Polynesia is via a small group of islands called the Marquesas. These lie 2600 miles southwest of the southern tip of Baja at about 10 degrees south latitude and on the other side of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), more commonly known as the Doldrums. From here one carefully makes way through the fringed reef islands of the Tuamotus and into the famous Society Island chain at whose center is Tahiti. Of course, one can continue trending west–the choices are nearly infinite–to the Cook Islands, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, the New Hebrides and find, eventually, New Zealand or Australia as did the explorers of old. But too much westing makes Hawaii a difficult destination, and Murre dearly wishes to see Hawaii this season, so we will launch north from Tahiti. 

This change of plans will add 2500 miles and about six months to the itinerary. The northern and southern hurricane seasons typically dovetail, and when, in October, cruising boats are required (by law) to depart French Polynesia in order to avoid their late year storms, hurricane season in the north has wound down, making passage to Hawaii safe. Once there, one must wait until late spring before a passage over the high and through the wintery northern latitudes is tenable.

So, Murre will depart south in a week or two, wander among the Polynesians until fall, plan to arrive in Hawaii in early November, and from there launch for home in May of 2012.

It all sounds so easy.