May 16, 2009

Easier Ride Again
Since we passed 10 south, we've had a lot less rain and a little more wind, though direction has often left something to be desired. We're at 13 deg 10 min S, 173 deg 20 min E now. The actual weather hasn't exactly coincided with the prognosis we've been getting, except that the weather data shows the entire sector to be fairly unstable, and prone to light wind. We did get a 10 hour dose of normal trade wind strength this afternoon, 10 hours of an 18 knot SE breeze, but that gave out before midnight. A Cinderella wind?? fax shows they expected us to have about 7 knits from a northerly direction, but we now have about 8 or 9 from the southeast. It's OK, we're making comfortable progress. There's a weak low pressure building up near Fiji, sort of a last, wimpy attempt of the South Pacific cyclone season, but it looks likely to move away and fall apart before we get to the vicinity, so we press on. It's taken us 2 weeks to make 1300 miles, about half the trip distance. That's been because of light winds. The next half could be slow too, but more likely because of foul and strong winds. I hope not. If we're going to go slow, I'd just as soon ghost along on flat water rather than beat ourselves up for every mile.
We're getting far enough from the Marshall Islands that it's hard to hear the Yokwe net any more. I continue to help run the Rag of the Air, in the mornings, and the 8 megahertz frequency reaches up there easily, so we still get to communicate with friends there. We're also checking into the Pacific Seafarers, so our position is posted daily on their yotreps web page.
The moon is down to half now, and waning, so it doesn't rise until about 11:00 PM. First half of the night watch was pretty dark tonight, and it's only going to get worse from here. Not too bad when the clouds clear, so the starlight is strong. The food selection is about to enter the boring stage now. All the eggs and fresh fruit are gone, and I'm rationing crackers and cookies a little bit. We won't starve soon, but rice & beans may get a little tiresome. Still, we're making 4.5 knots on a sea without a single whitecap on it. It could be a lot worse.
Had a little scare with the email a couple days ago, afraid people using the "reply" button were about to overload the sailmail inbox, but it worked out OK. Radio propagation has improved dramatically the last couple months, as we come up from the bottom of a 7 year sunspot cycle that made last year terrible for radio. That coupled with improved technology and us being better located for shore station contact has given us a lot better download speed than we had before. Still, I'm encouraging all to use KG4QYV@winlink.org for personal notes to us, so we keep the sailmail account open for weather info. Both are working well as onboard email, but the sailmail station at Firefly, Australia is the most reliable, available most times of the day or night, so that's for priority stuff. Interesting to watch normal human response develop into reflex action. As internet speeds for most people surpassed dialup speeds (56000 bps) it came to not matter in terms of time if the original emails were accumulated on the messages exchanged on a subject. With our newest, best radio code technology, we are getting close to a tenth of that old obsolete dialup speed, so every message we send includes an instruction to NOT use "reply", or to delete unneeded text. Not many people read that instruction. Habit is strong in human nature. That same characteristic is going to make it hard for us to respond to climate change technology too. Behavioral change requirements will have to take into account that people only change what they must.
Time to see if the radio can raise a winlink station in NZ. More soon, Ted
PS; Nice to hear (even indirectly) from the Hendrix contingent. Thanks, Butch. Alston, Joel, send us a line!