        |  On June 10th Vixen set sail from Hawaii bound for the west coast of Vancouver Island -- 2,500 miles away to the northwest. It was to be the final leg on an 11 year circumnavigation and I felt a certain amount of pressure not to mess up an otherwise successful journey around the world. Even before leaving Kaunakakai, the main village of Molokai, there had been some disasters narrowly averted. First, an unusually large swell from the southwest had arrived while we were birthed inside the Lahaina Harbor in Maui. The waves had stacked up until at one point I watched a surfer ride a wave across the entire width of the harbor entrance. “That is not a good sign,” I thought as I studied the pass; especially as I was planning to exit the harbor in a couple of hours. Then a local captain casually mentioned: “Sometimes these Hawaiian harbor entrances fill up with shifting sands when there is a big swell... takes months to dig them out.” Great. Now I knew I had to get out of there. Luckily, we timed our departure just right and shot out between the big wave sets without incident. We spent a couple of nights on a mooring off Lahaina doing last minute jobs before sailing to Molokai. We had stocked up on fuel, water and food for what I expected to be a 30-day trip to Canada. The morning we were ready to leave I turned the key to start the engine and nothing happened. After a few tests I announced to Tiffany and Solianna that the starter was cooked. They both stared back in disbelief imagining the days or weeks we would be delayed. Then I triumphantly revealed that I had a spare starter! An hour later we were motoring over to the neighboring island of Molokai. We spent about a week on Molokai decompressing from the intensity of Lahaina which was longer than expected but it was so pleasant and the anchorage in Kaunakakai so protected that we were loath to leave. Finally on the 10th of June we set off for Canada. The route to Victoria is not direct. In theory a high pressure system settles in between Hawaii and Vancouver Island during the summer called the “North Pacific High”. The center of this clockwise spinning high has no wind so, for a sailor, the route to Victoria from Hawaii is due north to 40 or 45 degrees and then a curve to the east avoiding the center of the high. Realistically, going east from Hawaii is not an option anyways because of the 20 to 30 knot easterly tradewinds which would be miserable if not impossible to beat into. But first we had to get around Molokai so we headed west, downwind, with the idea of heading up through the gap between Oahu and Molokai. This proved impossible because of the shallow water off the west end of Molokai, the “Penguin Bank”, and the fact that the trades had shifted to the northeast which they sometimes do. As I headed up to run through the channel I could see Oahu in the distance as one long leeward shore We turned back downwind and decided to duck into the lee of Oahu then try going north through the channel between Oahu and Kauai. By sunset Vixen was running past Diamond Head and just a couple of miles from the lights of downtown Honolulu. Tiffany and I remembered doing this exact passage between the islands ten years ago. I suppose if you continuously sail around the world in ten year cycles your life just becomes a series of cascading deja vus. We would have stopped in Honolulu but there is nowhere to anchor and we were ready to be on our way to Canada so we sailed through the calm water of Oahu's lee during the night. Tiffany was on watch as we cleared the northwest point of Oahu and headed north to the open ocean. Kaena Point fired up another deja vu of seeing albatross chicks nesting on the rocks ten years earlier when we had lived in Honolulu for a few months. Up to this point the distance to Victoria had been getting bigger as we reached west to clear the islands but now as we aimed north we were at least kind of pointing in the right direction. The change from the pulsing lights and noise of Oahu to the deserted ocean just a half day sail to the north was striking. As the island slipped below the horizon I saw a single fishing boat plying the northern shores; that was the last sign of humans we were to see for over two weeks until we crossed the Los Angeles – Tokyo shipping lane where we saw a few ships in the distance. And so we fell into our familiar offshore routine: Solianna and Seffa Jane had endless stories read to them although I noticed more and more that Solianna would slip off into her bunk to read to herself. Tiffany kept busy making leather-bound books, baked an apple pie and lots of sourdough bread. I tackled all the long books I had put aside for the passage: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a re-reading of Moby Dick, Boswell's Life of Johnson etc... All the books that life ashore does not allow time for. If you like to read large books -- offshore sailing is for you. Every night I took the first watch from 9PM to 2AM. Tiffany was on guard from 2AM to 7AM. A common scene was Vixen sailing through the night self-steering over the ocean while Tiffany and the girls slept. I would be sitting at the chart table holding my shortwave receiver up to our iPad on which a weatherfax app would translate the radio clicks and beeps into a weather chart. At first I received them out of Honolulu and then out of Pt Reyes California with remarkable clarity. No one I know still uses weather faxes (most have access to satellite GRIB files) and I often felt these forecasters were doing all this work just for me which was probably not far from the truth. The weather proved to be typical of most ocean passages – a couple of gales with 30 to 40 knots, a couple of days of calms where we had to motor and a few days of really sweet sailing. We had our AIS (Automatic Identification System) running on this trip which could detect ships up to 30 miles away and never had a reading for weeks and weeks. I would guess that there were not more than a handful of humans occupying some of the 1000 mile stretches we sailed across. As I write this I am sitting in a car in a line for the Orcas Island ferry having just driven through Seattle traffic and can't quite comprehend the concentrations of humans. It is a bit shocking and will take some time to adjust. We were not alone, however, out on the ocean. Soon after we cleared Oahu we started seeing small blue jellyfish with half-disc sails which I learned later are called sail jellyfish. They were concentrated to about one per square meter and sometimes even denser than that. Night and day we sailed for three weeks through these jellyfish. A rough estimate put their number at 5 billion. Every 10 meters were these other very strange creatures called “buoy barnacles” which are bright blue, shell-less barnacles which extrude and cling to a blob of yellow foam. A couple of times Solianna and I netted both the barnacles and the jellyfish for further investigation. We also saw orca whales, a few bottlenose whales and an albatross that followed us for a week or so. Just off the bow of Vixen there was a 6 inch long reef fish which had taken refuge under Vixen when we were near Hawaii. For a whole week the little thing swam valiantly night and day trying to keep in Vixen's protective shadow . Fish don't show a lot of emotion but there was something in the movement of this reef fish swimming in water that was five miles deep that can only be described as frantic bordering on outright panic. Every day I was surprised to see him still there struggling to keep up. And then, tragically, one morning he was gone; most likely dolphin food but possibly off on an epic quest to re-find the coral. About 1000 miles from Ucluelet I saw another sailboat. It was the first and only one we saw on the whole voyage. I was so startled and it was so distant I didn’t believe it was real. With binoculars I confirmed it was a yawl about 5 miles away off to starboard. I hailed the boat on the radio but got no response. For the next 24 hours this “mystery” boat sailed with us but never acknowledged us. I thought it might be a single-hander keeping a very poor watch but it seemed unusual for them not to spot us for a whole day. The yawl actually got close enough during the night that I worried we might run into it. The wind was picking up for the final gale which made it harder to maneuver but by morning the “mystery” boat had disappeared never to be seen again. As as the gale mounted and the waves got larger I couldn’t help but think that it would be tragic to make it this far on our journey only to have a plank spring a leak or the keel fall off just a thousand miles from our final destination. Although Tiffany and I agreed that this final passage was somewhat typical of offshore sailing -- a couple of gales, a couple of calms -- I think that if we had these conditions on our first sail from Victoria to Hawaii in 2004 we may have not continued. In fact, we got very lucky on that first 24 day passage. I felt that despite this final storm the experience of eleven years of crossing oceans was helping propel us to our ultimate landfall. At one point the weather fax called for 14 foot seas with the occasional 20 foot waves. We put the third and smallest reef in the mainsail, raised the tiny storm jib and went below for two days while Vixen steered her course. (We did, of course, maintain a 24 hour watch.) Large breaking waves frequently filled the cockpit. I don’t know how windy it was but we were averaging about seven knots with hardly any sail up so it must have been at least 40 knots or more. When everything calmed down I went on deck and discovered that our carved Vixen sign on the port side had been ripped away by a wave and there was a crack in the caprail where the stanchion had been forced inboard by a large amount of water hitting it. The good news was that we were getting very close to Ucluelet. After a couple days of easy sailing we were just fifty miles to our landfall. I was counting the ETA in hours not days for the first time. But again we were deterred from taking an easy path -- a brisk southwest wind came up right on the bow and forced us to wait another day before finally motoring into the protected harbor of Ucluelet. And even then as I approached the customs dock the low oil pressure light flickered on indicating some kind of engine trouble. We cleared into Canada after being boarded by the typical ogreish customs officials. I smiled and nodded and tried to pretend I was just a normal Canadian out for a day sail to Hawaii which is what they wanted to hear. When they asked when I had last been in Canada I replied: "Two years ago." The two uniformed thugs studiously wrote this down assuming that we had been in western Canada two years ago when in fact it had been New Brunswick on the east coast and since then we had crossed the Atlantic to Senegal and then crossed again to go through the Panama Canal and sailed about 8,000 miles up the Pacific. But we had done nothing wrong and after properly intimidating us with white gloves and inspecting the interior we were welcomed into Canada. It was a relief to reach land after 26 days at sea but we were not quite done; Victoria lay 100 miles to the southeast and our family was waiting to greet us. After a good night sleep I determined the fuel lift pump was leaking diesel into the engine oil. I had been carrying a spare around for the last five years so within couple of hours we were motoring back out to the ocean and on our way to Victoria. Twelve hours later the wind had picked up and we were jibing through the Strait of Juan de Fuca in heavy fog with ships all around us -- we were not home yet. Tiffany and I did not sleep for 24 hours because we had so many course changes and had to keep a very sharp watch. The AIS payed for itself as it picked up ship after ship on the display. Finally, on the following morning we broke out of the fog just ten miles from Victoria harbor. The sun was shining and we motored into the inner harbor where our parents and Tiffany’s sister, Jane, met us at the dock. Vixen tied up in front of the Empress Hotel where we had last birthed ten years and ten months ago. It was yet another deja vu: the Empress Hotel majestic and covered in ivy with Vixen moored in front. It had been the backdrop of all we had done in Victoria for the two years we had lived in the harbor on Vixen. Although the scene looked the same, much had changed in those ten years and ten months. We had added Solianna and Seffa Jane to the crew and we had seen many countries and sailed across many oceans. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had not expected. For eleven years my mind had been continually running over every element of our ship to keep it working and reliable. With Vixen back home safely, it was time for a very long rest. |
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