We are anchored safely in The Bay of Virgins. We adjusted our watches and clock and are now GMT -9 1/2 (yes, one of those strange half hour time zones). Today will be about walking on land, relaxing, champagne and maybe a swim. Hopefully today will NOT be about cleaning and tidying.

The daily updates to this blog will stop for a while, so you can have your Facebook feeds and inboxes back for now. Thanks to all of you who read along on our little adventure and sent us emails. Little do you know how much these little messages from land lit up our day, sorry if we wren’t always quick to reply.

Thanks to all those who helped with fishing tips and recipes, with support and encouragement. It made a difference.

Right, where is that beer.

Every so often it his us. The trigger can be mundane or momentous. With feet in a bucket of soapy laundry, surrounded by the crystal clear waters of a tropical anchorage. Or watching the faintest outline of a moonlit island rise out of the seemingly endless ocean. And for a fleeting instant one of us feels it and has to share. The emotion is profound yet playful, passing yet ever present… and sharing it always makes us smile.

Every so often it hits us.
We live on a boat.

Land-ho.

It’s surprisingly hard to make a boat go slower than the wind wants. But today we averaged about 4.5knots without much sail up at all. So we are on schedule for a dawn arrival on the island of Fatu Hiva, in the Marquesas. Touch wood.

Today was a day of finishing things.

Everyone landed a hand to Mia in an attempt to get the boat bunting project completed, even Jon got his hands busy by braiding the twine into the rope required for the job. The last egg was used by Tina to make wonderful pancakes for lunch. The last ‘noon sight’ was marked on the chart we have stuck up on the wall, as we track our progress across the Pacific. The last of the Star Wars movies ‘The Last Jedi’ was watched completing Tina’s introduction to the Star Wars series. And we begin the last of the night watches for a while. So it goes.

We also took stock of all our trash from the last 28 days. When we crossed the Atlantic it took 14 days (from Cape Verde to Barbados) and we had only one extra adult onboard. But we produced around 3 largish black trash bags of landfill for the Barbados government to deal with. So we were understandably concerned about the amount of trash we’d produce crossing the Pacific, and the immediate problem of where to store it on the boat until we get there. We simply don’t have space for 6 large trash sacks.

The solution came from a friend’s blog, sailingtotem.com – they recommended that all plastic be stuffed into empty 5L water bottles. So right before we left Tina sweet talked a Swedish super yacht to give us a few bottles from their trash. You’d think it wouldn’t make much difference, but you’d be wrong. The photo attached to this blog shows 28 days of trash, everything that isn’t biodegradable, in two 5L jugs. One of those 5L jugs lasts us two weeks worth of plastic, or about 6 regular sized kitchen trash bags of uncompressed plastic wrappers.

The stuff that is in the purple bag is anything that isn’t biodegradable and is too big to fit through the neck of the bottle, it is mostly tetra-pack UHT milk cartons and plastic pots from yoghurt.

So what, if anything do we throw it the sea? Well the depends a little bit on where we are going to make landfall and how long we’re going to be offshore. For example, if we know there is recycling at the end of the journey then we’ll wash and keep tins and glass for recycling. Sometimes we even store paper and card for recycling.

For the Pacific, we’re not going to be anywhere with a recycling centre until we reach New Zealand (could be wrong about this). But it’s a fair bet that all trash in French Polynesia either gets burned or landfilled. So for this crossing we threw the following into the sea: food waste, paper, card, glass, tins and cans. These items will all biodegrade over time, with the tins, cans and glass sinking to the ocean floor to erode or rust.

/contentious option of Jon alone
It’s not ideal, but then waste management outside of the developed world is rarely ideal. There is a very good chance that all the plastic we bring to French Polynesia will just be burned in low temperature fires which is about the worst thing you can do with it for the macro-environment. I fact you could make an argument we’d be better sending the plastic trash to the ocean floor than putting it into a trash can in Fatu Hiva. /end of contentious option of Jon

Anyway.

The full moon has just risen over the horizon, the wind is warm and steady, the seas are long and following and the sky is full of stars. Hopefully a good night ahead. We’ll sent a quick update when we’re safely anchored. Not sure if we’ll have any real internet on our cell phones, but at the very least we’ll make a quick blog post.

Another quiet day as we watch the clock and the miles to go.

Mia and Tina got stuck into the last of the boat bunting project, stitching all the of the flags onto the rope so we can hang it up the mast. They have made good progress and are trying to get it all done before we get to land.

Speaking of land, we’ve slowed down. That’s right, after 4000 miles at a brisk walk we’ve decided to amble the last day and a half! WHY?! So we don’t arrive in the middle of the night. The ideal time to make landfall, especially somewhere you don’t know well and isn’t well marked with navigational aids, is early in the morning. So with a slight reduction in speed we’re now looking at an ETA of Thursday morning rather than in the middle of the night on Wednesday.

While Mia and Tina got on with the bunting, Teo and Jon got stuck into boat school which has been going well for the last few days. Hopefully we’ll keep the positive momentum going when we get to French Polynesia. If not, well, there is always the foreign legion.

In other news, our provisioning is critical. We’re down to our last egg. And no more eggs means no more cakes. Serious business. To defuse the stress of the situation Jon baked a pineapple upside-down cake. And while we’re on the subject of food, tonight’s culinary extravaganza was home made Pizza by Tina. Yum!

Not much else to report from the day. Teo and Tina are married. Mia and Jon are their kids. It was their anniversary today, Tina forgot but Teo reminded her and organised a movie to celebrate. Jon and Mia are twins and it was their birthday today also, Teo made ‘pancakes’ to celebrate and wrapped ‘presents’ for us to open. It’s been a strange kinda day.

Last day tomorrow with a little luck. Short and sweet.

It was a quiet day of routines today.

We have a watch system on Itchy Foot, so in theory there is always one person responsible to keeping watch, making sure the boats is going in the right direction, adjusting the sails and making sure we don’t hit anything. Our autopilot takes care of actually steering, either based on a compass heading or based on a wind direction; either way the human intervention required is normally minimal.

There are two lengths of watches, three hour nighttime watches and four hour daytime ones. We run nighttime watches from sunset until dawn, 6pm until 6am and generally adjust the ships clock to keep the time and the sun in sync.

When designing the watch system you have an important choice, do people want to keep the same hours everyday day or do they want to be on a different watch each day, cycling through them. The obvious advantage of never changing is that your body more easily copes with fixed sleep and awake times. The advantage of variety is just that, variety. One day you get to see the dawn, the next you get the middle of the night and stars to go with it – we chose the later and variety.

6pm – 9pm: Jon had this watch last night, the first of the three hour night watches. The watch system not only dictates who is on watch, but it also tied into other chores around the boat, including who is cooking what meal on what day. The person who has the 6pm to 9pm watch also cooks dinner that day. The theory being that they have finished cooking by 6pm and their watch includes sitting on deck and eating together. They don’t do the dishes. 6-9 is a good watch, you see the sunset and the stars come out, the boat is slowly getting quiet, people who are off watch are brushing teeth, reading, tidying up and getting into bed. It’s not too hard to stay awake and 9pm comes quite quickly.

9pm – midnight: Mia always takes over from Jon on watch. She was still awake and reading in bed before coming up to take her watch. And this is the problem with the 9pm watch, after dinner is finished, dishes done, Teo in PJs with brushed teeth, there isn’t much time before the 9pm person has to get up again. It’s often not worth getting any sleep. This makes this watch quite a long one, the last hour can drag.

midnight – 3am: Tina takes over from Mia in our system. Different people have different views on this watch, Jon really doesn’t like it as the 3-4 hours sleep you get prior doesn’t really feel like enough and he finds it hard to clear his head. Mia doesn’t mind this watch, and enjoys the fact that when you go to bed again at 3am you don’t have any responsibilities again until 10am – so you get a nice long morning.

3-6am: Jon takes over from Tina. Unusually his alarm didn’t work this morning so received a much needed prod awake at 3:10 from Tina. The 3-6 watch isn’t too bad, finishing the last watch at 9pm you are ready and able to go straight to sleep, so with 6 hours of sleep (9-3) under your belt getting up at 3am isn’t too bad. Plus you get the benefit of sneaking back to bed at 6am for a morning snooze before the day starts.

Today Mia was on the first daytime watch, a four hour watch from 6am until 10am, which sees the sun come up and lately sees Teo pop his head out on deck around 7ish. After breakfast, Teo entertained himself quietly in the cockpit with an audiobook on low volume, trying not take make any noise and wake the sleeping crew. Tina, had the midnight until 3am watch and so was still sleeping on the sofa/bed in the main saloon. Jon sleeping in the back cabin would only get woken by the sails complaining or a call from someone needing help on deck.

The day continues in a pattern: once everyone has woken-up a bit, usually around 9:30, the most needy person will put on a pot of coffee and heat some milk. Breakfast is on a ‘help yourself’ basis.

Watches during the day are a lot more ad-hoc and relaxed than the nighttime watches, often most of the crew are up on deck anyway and given we are a long way from shipping and the nearest land is either 4000m below us or 500 miles ahead of us, there isn’t a lot to hit.

Mia went back to bed after her long 6am to 10am watch, feeling a bit tired and figuring she could get some rest. So with Tina officially on watch (from 10am-2pm) Jon and Teo settled down to do some boat school. Which usually happens between 10am and 1pm on passage.

Jon was on dinner duty last night so he is on lunch duty today. We had a few eggs left so while Teo was finishing off some school work Jon made scrambled eggs with toast from the Tina’s freshly baked bread. The person who makes lunch also does the dishes from lunch. Once lunch is finished the same person, Jon today, takes over the next watch from 2pm until 6pm. The afternoons are usually quiet, some playtime, project time, maybe a round of tea or coffee and maybe someone makes cakes or finds some biscuits.

And that brings us back to the next round of night watches. Mia, rather than Jon, takes the first of the night watches (6-9) and tomorrow it’ll be Tina who starts the night watches before cycling back to Jon again.

Finally the watch system also includes the role of mum. Nothing to do with Teo or child care, but mum for the boat. Mum does the evening meal dishes, cleans the toilet, cleans the galley, the stove top, checks the fruit and veg for rot, turns the eggs, cleans and fills water bottles and fairly much anything else which obviously needs a little clean or tidy. The role of mum also cycles with the watches, and is the person who had no cooking responsibilities.

So there you have it, a long and wordy post without much excitement. But hopefully, if you’ve gotten this far, gives you a glimpse of our routine and daily life on passage. As we bob across the blue.

Early this morning the wind returned, the boat speed skipped from 3,5knots to 6,5knots as the sun came up on a new day. By mid afternoon we were buzzing along at 7.5knots and even contemplating reducing sail. Our projected ‘time to go’ went from 120hours last night and by mid afternoon was down to 74 hours. If this wind holds, which it is forecast to do, then with luck we’ll be safely anchored in the Marquesas on Thursday.

But there are still 500 miles to go, so lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Our weekly Saturday quiz happened today, rather than yesterday, and as usual it was excellently prepared and hosted by Quizmaster Tina. Teo as usual has no problems with the Harry Potter round, only needing help from his teammate Jon on the make and model of the Weasly’s Flying Car. All were foxed by the question, ‘What percentage of the population of the world lives below the equator?” being significantly lower than expected.

As usual it finished with a poetry round, however this time the theme for the round came in the form of a pictorial puzzle. Teo helped his parents solve it and we discovered the theme was ‘Itchy Foot is a spaceship in disguise’ – clearly Tina knows her audience. In the end the final quiz of the passage was declared a draw and everyone a winner.

For the last week or two, Tina has been baking bread every night on her watch. In the morning it fills the boat with such comforting and delicious smells. For lunch today we raided the freezer and found homemade carrot soup to go with the bread. Yum! The irony is that on passage we actually eat better than when we’re on anchor, with lunch often relegated behind projects, chores or day trips and adventure.

Teo was officially stir crazy today, it had to happen eventually. After boat school, he and Mia spent the day making and flying paper aeroplanes down below, but really needed to run around and climb things. His iPad has been put away in the chart table for the last couple of days as he was getting a little lost in it. So between loud complaints of being ‘boooooorrreeed’ he has also been happily playing with toys, drawing and making aeroplanes. Mia started a really nice project with him a few days ago, making a comic book style journal for the passage – thirty little pictures to tell the story of our crossing. In a few days we’ll hopefully be surrounded by crystal clear waters, full of inquisitive fish, colourful coral and graceful rays to entertain us all. Not to mention mountains to climb and waterfalls to swim in. Hold on!

Jon spent a couple of hours pouring over guidebooks, cruising guides and blogs from those who have gone before us. It is clear you could spend months happily exploring the bays and beaches of the marquesas and we only have weeks. It will be hard to prioritise as so much looks tempting, but if that is the worst of our problems then we’ll be OK!

We discussed today if having more money to buy upgrades and fixes for Itchy Foot would make us happier, if for example, if money wasn’t a significant consideration would we be more content? Jon’s opinion was no, more money wouldn’t really make cruising more fun. Once you have enough that you aren’t constantly stressed about money then extra doesn’t make you happier.

People who seem happiest are those who best adapt to their current situation, not those who have the most.

Maybe the same is true of wind. Like yesterday, we don’t have much wind and not nearly as much as we would like. But rather than get too worried about it we dropped the sails and went for a swim in the big blue.

Truth be told it wasn’t ideal conditions for a mid-ocean swim either, the chop was a little too high and the swell a little too big. But we were careful, stopping the boat in the water, trailing some lines behind us to hold onto and always having an adult or two onboard the whole time. It was glorious, the water was warm and perfectly clear and everyone felt a lot better for a dip and a swim on this otherwise hot and windless day.

If you ever get the chance to go swimming in the middle of the ocean, do it. There is something humbling about knowing you are so far out of your depth, so far from land. The ocean is so deep here they don’t even bother to put in on the charts I have. It must be 3 miles deep. And we are about 700 miles from the nearest land. As well as being refreshing and a way to wash away the heat, it also makes you feel mortal and therefore alive.

And another observation from a mid-ocean swim? Itchy Foot is dirty! You can tell we’ve been on the same tack for the last few weeks as the entire starboard side is covered in algae! Also the stern is completely covered in barnacles! Lots of cleaning work to be done when we get to the Marquesas.

What else? Teo did some great reading today in boat school. Mia and Teo went through his toy cupboard today. Tina made lovely olive bread, which we dipped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar for an afternoon snack. Jon decided that he needed cake, so made a batch of brownies. Jon and Tina fixed the spinnaker car which broke yesterday, so we can pole out the headsail again. And we finished the day, as the sun was setting by watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens up on deck.

We sailed half the distance we normally do, but it was a good day.

Sometime around midnight last night the wind shifted and shortly after died. So after much flapping and fussing of sails they were furled away and on went the motor.

In very light winds you have a couple of options:

Keep on sailing, adjusting course and sails to make the best of it, but ultimately listen to the horrendously expensive (about the price of a small car) set of sails flap themselves to death. Good times.
Furl away the sails and put on the motor, burning about 3 litres and hour of fuel (3-5 USD an hour – or about 100 USD a day). Putting up with the noise and smell from the diesel engine (the same one they used to put in London Black Taxis).
Take down the sails and simply bob about in the ocean waiting for the wind to return. Super uncomfortable and soul destroying.

We pick option b most of the time – mostly because we value having sails that are currently in good condition and can’t bare to hear them get trashed. So we motored until the sun came up. When Tina came on watch, she and Jon managed to get itchy foot sailing again, albeit very slowly and in the wrong direction, but at least the sails were mostly happy.

After a cup of coffee we fixed the direction problem, gybing the spinnaker pole which is a job that should be easy but really never is. And after lunch we switched the genoa (big white flappy sail at the front) for a spinnaker (even bigger and colourful flappy sail at the front). This worked moderately well, except for the rally seas. Anyway, long story boring, in the afternoon we took down the sails and started motoring again into the night.

What else?

Oh it is a small world. As mentioned in an earlier blog post we are part of a couple of satellite email based fleets where we exchange our position and other details with other cruisers out crossing the Pacific. Well, Jon noticed a new boat joined the fleet today as it departs Panama. Victoria from New Zealand.

For those of you who haven’t been reading and memorising this blog for the last two year (why not?!) Itchy Foot met Jim and Karin from Victoria back in Port de Andrax in Mallorca over two years ago. They were intact the first real cruising couple that Itchy Foot ever met, being in their 70s and having been cruising on and off since the 80s. We could talk for hours about this amazing couple, but just go read the blog post from back then if you are interested (April/May 2016). Back then we didn’t have Atlantic crossing plans much less Pacific plans, but when we said goodbye we hoped we would see them downwind.

We also discovered a few weeks ago that Tina has a playmate onboard another boat in the fleet, Rogue. Tina, as I’m sure many of you know, has crossed the Pacific before, when she was five years old with her parents. Well, on that trip she her mom became good friends and stayed in contact with a couple from New Zealand who also had kids, playmates with Tina. Being a small world, it turns out that one of those playmates is now sailing across the Pacific with HIS five year old kids on a boat called Rogue who are currently a few hundred miles behind us.

I see play dates in our future; not just for Teo.

Oh and just to embarrass her I’ll upload a photo of Tina aged 5 crossing the Pacific and a recreation of the photo from a few days ago – hardly changed at all!.

You have two options.

Either option a) live with your house and all it’s contents leaning to the left at a fairly constant but bouncy10-30 degree tilt. Or option b) your house will sedately wallow between 10 degrees to the left and 10 degrees to the right, like some drunken rockstar’s metronome.

We’ve just switched from option a and sailing broad reach (with both the big white flappy things out on the same side) to option b and dead downwind and gull winged (one big white flappy thing on each side).. And we get to go about a knot slower to boot! Don’t look at me, it wasn’t my doing, the wind shifted.

There are upsides obviously, many things are easier when the boat is flatter for example going to the toilet is easy like this. But working in the galley just got harder; previously you could just lean something again the downhill wall with high confidence it will stay there for the time it takes to chop an onion. Now the downhill wall switches every 2-5 seconds so all bets are off.

However, never deterred we opened Champagne anyway. Why? Because we are under 1000 miles to go! Which we were yesterday, but Mia wasn’t feeling well and now she is, so today we celebrate instead. But that’s not all, we have other reasons to celebrate, our Latitude just passed 123 45.67. Clearly we’re not short of reasons to open bubbles on an otherwise dry boat.

And, more importantly we had a display of all the flags that Mia (with guest flags from Tina and Teo) has made for her bunting project. About 50 colourful little triangles in total. Next step is to stitch them to the line that Tina has braided (she likes to braid) and we’ll fly them as soon as we drop anchor in the Marquesas. Hopefully in a few days time!

But wait, there’s more! Gecky, our imaginatively named pet Gecko who snuck onboard as a stowaway somewhere in Panama, decided to come inside today after months hiding out somewhere on deck. He isn’t very big, maybe the length of your thumb, but ever so cute and a welcome team member with special skills in bug control. Eagle eye’d Teo spotted him from across the room, hiding out next to the light switch.

Oh and we also caught a MONSTER FROM THE DEEP during dinner. Tina or Jon normally bring the fishing lines in after dinner which is also just when it’s getting dark. But today dinner was late and we moved the clocks back (Pitcairn Time -8) and so it was dark when we finished our Thai fish curry. When we went to pull it in there wasn’t much pressure on the line so figured the fish had spit the lure. But no! A two-foot long sliver scaled monster with a mouth full of fangs was on the end of the line – not too pleased with us. Given that it was mostly bones and death we decided to throw him back after a quick photo op. Our best guess is that was a Cutlass fish or Ribbon fish.

It’s 4am here and the wind has dropped and shifted again. We are now heading to Hawaii and should get there in August. Best go pull something.

We all hit the ‘I want to go for a walk’ wall today. We mustn’t grumble however as the sailing as once again been excellent today, the waves could do with calming down a bit, but given the horror stories we’ve heard from others about uncomfortable seas we’re quite content. In need of a walk, but content.

So it is a good job that we hit the ‘less than 1000 miles to go’ milestone today. The celebrations were on the quiet side as Mia has been feeling ill (not sea sickness, some other undiagnosed not-well-ness) for all of the day. But there was a small hurrah! Teo wanted to know what all the excitement was about and so Jon asked him “How many miles do you think we have left to go?” and hr straight face replied “Four? Three? No. Six?” Jon broke the news. “IF YOU ASK ME THAT IS NOTHING TO CELEBRATE!” – I think Teo may be done now too.

With a little luck and weather on our side then maybe dropping anchor off the shores of France in about 7 days time. Oh la la.

What else? We broke into the vacuum packed Gouda that we’ve had sitting in the bottom of the fridge since Bonaire (October) and had delicious Cheese, Tomato and Chutney sandwiches on freshly baked break. It’s the simple things your taste buds miss.

In terms of boat projects, not a lot happened today, Jon found his project mojo and went through all our mooring lines and splicing a loop into the end of each one. So with our protected fenders and newly spliced lines we are ready the Pacific where we won’t likely see a marina for the next year. Timing is everything.

Fishing! Jon caught a lovely King Mackerel which will make a change from Mahi-mahi. His filleting is improving but skinning skills leave a lot to be desired. He claims that he needs a longer and more flexible knife, something about bad workmen and tools springs to mind.

Time for a night watch. Mia is getting the night off, under doctors orders from Teo, after he took great care of her all day bringing blankets, drinks, cuddly toys on the sofa and even a movie to watch. So Mia is asleep and Teo has insomnia, which he gets from time to time. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic to watch him toss and turn, interspersed with stage sighs and yawns.

We’ll shift time zones again tomorrow, so that should help!