Nasdaq Crew Diary: Duck Hunting in the Pacific

4 April 2018

So here we are at last, in the middle of our voyage across the immense Pacific Ocean; well not exactly the middle perhaps, more in the words of Churchill, approaching the end of the beginning of the voyage, with about 1600 nautical miles behind us and some 3800 nautical miles still to go.

So far the Pacific has lived up to its name, rather than its reputation. When Cortez stood on the Peak in Darien and Magellan sailed through the storms of his eponymous straits at Cape Horn (my history here may be a bit erratic in the absence of Wikipedia – did he really sail from east to west?) and contemplated the vast ocean it looked peaceful, blue and benign. It was only when sailors ventured further beyond the equator into the northern latitudes that it started to earn its reputation epitomised by crab fishermen in the Aleutians in the Worlds Deadliest Catch as an ocean of storms and house sized waves. Fortunately to date we have not encountered much of this, although change is threatened imminently with winds gusting up to 40-50 knots forecast for tomorrow. So far, whilst not quite the zen-like glassy calm of the Sea of Tranquillity we experienced around Japan and which we contemplate each night gazing at the near-full Easter moon as it starts to wane, it has started to provide relatively fast sailing under spinnaker, enabling us to start to eat up the miles to Seattle.

Leaving the volcanoes and lights of Japan far behind, the ocean today is grey and bleak, despite the spring sunshine, and very empty. Devoid of wildlife apart from the occasional lonesome albatross and lacking the swarms of fishing boats and colossal supertankers and container-ships which characterised the waters around China and Japan, the solitude is broken only by the glimmer of lights on the horizon from Dare To Lead and HotelPlanner.com who vainly trim their sails in an attempt to shake off our pursuit. It's easy to appreciate in this vast empty boundless world that water covers almost 70% of the earth, and that most of this is here in the Pacific.

Meanwhile life on the good ship Nasdaq continues its endless cycle of eat, sleep, sail, repeat. The eating and sleeping bit are well documented, the sailing bit generally familiar to our regular readers, but for those new to this blog you may like to know that the sailing bit is far more than steering the ship and hoisting, trimming, dropping and repacking sails. There are the four regular tasks assigned to crew members, usually in pairs on each watch. In addition to Mother, which comes round every nine days, these are Heads & Cleaning, Bilges, Deck & Trim and Nav & Log.

Heads & cleaning, everyone's favourite, comes round to each crew member at least twice as often to them as to everyone else. Without going into too much detail in the family blog it entails squirting blue stuff down the toilets, scrubbing down the floors and walls to head height (yes you'd be surprised) with anti-bacterial spray, replenishing toilet rolls, wet wipes and soaps, emptying or otherwise disposing of the pooh bags (fully biodegradable and eagerly consumed by fish) and on some boats (but fortunately not Nasdaq as we are built of sterner stuff) recharging the scent sticks, rearranging the flowers and replacing the air fresheners. It also requires periodically anti-baccing anywhere below decks someone might grab, such as handles and handrails, companion-way, wall surfaces etc

Bilges, which used to be the second most popular task has taken on a new dimension with the introduction of NasDuck hunting. It entails every hour checking and when necessary emptying the five bilges we have on the boat. Every drop of water which falls to the floor, whether from waves over the deck, dripping foulies or spilt coffee ends up in one of these bilges. In the absence of such luxuries as automatic pumps, this water then has to be soaked up with sponges or bailed with margarine containers into buckets, carried to the companionway and deposited over the side. Getting to the bilge water involves lifting the floor boards in the galley, saloon, sail-locker, accommodation area and delving into the engine room and lazarette (the isolated compartment at the stern where mooring lines, sheets and rubbish are stowed). In the great NasDuck hunt, the previous watch hides our NasDuck (a squeezy yellow duck) in one of the bilges in a creative manner, leaving the next watch to be diligent in its duties and discover its nesting place. So far the score is 3 to Port and 4 to Starboard but with five watches a day the scoreboard changes frequently and is testing the creative powers of the hiders to come up with new nest sites. Stuffed inside Bob's (our man overboard mannequin who lives in the sail locker bilge) foulies doesn't count.

The next regular task is Nav and Log, probably really the most popular as it allows the assigned crew members to disappear down below on an hourly basis to warm up whilst filling in the detailed columns of the log book. This includes recording time, position, speed, wind speed, sea state, weather and visibility. Although all this sounds relatively straightforward, copying down numbers from the various instruments, it also calls for periodic plots on the chart to record our position, a task which can sometimes be a bit fraught for the cartographically-challenged. Doing it when the boat is bouncing around like a bucking bronco with you clinging precariously to the Nav table adds to the challenge.

The task is made further more interesting by including pumping the grey water tank by means of handle in the wet locker where the life jackets and foulies are stored. It also includes checking on the position, speed and course of any competitors near enough to appear on AIS and any other vessels in the vicinity. In busier waters this could be a full time and sometimes hair raising job picking our way between boats, playing last across with tankers and dodging fishing nets. However one of the benefits of this task is that you get to see our progress and look at exactly where we are on the planet.

Last but not least in our list of tasks is Deck & Trim, a popular largely outdoor recreational pursuit which entails periodically walking the deck and checking. Checking safety gear, checking lines, checking that halyards are not crossed or wrapped around forestays, checking blocks and pulleys and of course checking sail trim (although in this all crew participate constantly).

All in all life on board Nasdaq is a hectic, busy round of tasks, with little time for boredom or quiet contemplation. If these tasks are insufficient there are endless other tasks, routines and practice drills to occupy our time as we speed our way across the great Pacific Ocean. Today has been our best day so far with over 255 nautical miles beaten down in our race north-eastwards towards Seattle, which somehow now doesn't seem quite so far away nor the Pacific quite so immense. Everyone is eagerly anticipating our stop over in the city of coffee, aeroplanes and windows.