Chapter 2: The Pacific Crossing

Two days later he had sailed northwest for almost 200 miles. He just passed the Three Kings Islands and turned due East as he plotted his next course and keyed it into the GPS. He was now headed directly for Valparaiso Chile.

Valparaiso was the port city for Chile's capitol, Santiago. He had been there during his Navy years and loved the friendly people there. After a long anticipated rest, he planned to head up the west coast of South America and go through the canal.

Several days later he had barely crossed the International Date line when the wind seemed to die to almost nothing. The wind was so light you couldn't steer, the boat lolled gently from side to side as it lost direction, so he turned the steering off. For several hours he got a feather light breeze from one direction and then another. Then the wind stopped altogether. The rest of that day was quite boring as he sat in the cockpit wishing for some wind.

The next morning after workout and breakfast there was nothing to do so he grabbed a bucket and some soap and started to give the topside a good scrubbing. Then he did a thorough field day inside too. After a couple days of cleaning and polishing wood, the boat was as good as it had ever been and still there was no wind.

The odd thing about a sailboat is that it's main engine is the weather, you lived and died at the mercy of weather. Without wind he still had the 18 horse diesel engine, but with only 25 gallons of fuel she wasn't going to get to Chili. Sitting there baking in the sun wasn't very fun either. It was December so it was high summer down here and the latitude was similar to Norfolk, Virginia. Summer was hot.

It is particularly hot when there is no wind and you are stuck in one spot. The sky was clear blue and except for an occasional fish, the water was flat and glass-like. Just breathing seemed intolerable.

Ancient mariners had run into this problem many times. The middle Atlantic region had an area where they often ran out of wind. The area was called the doldrums. Actually the term doldrums was both a noun and a verb. He was in the doldrums. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. He played games on his laptop and read several of the books he had brought along.

And still there was no wind. Around 11:00 a.m. each morning it would get hot and sweaty and he was very uncomfortable until sundown when it would cool off a little.

There were no ships or boats out here. He was south of the main shipping channels. There were no islands even within several hundred miles of his planned course. He could not reach anyone on the VHF, since on a good day it only went 15 to 18 miles. It was very lonely out there. He ran the engine for about an hour once a day just to keep the batteries happy and the electronics fed.

After three weeks of being becalmed, he decided he needed to do something. He started the engine and turned due south. By keeping her at half throttle he was able to make 5 knots. If he could get someplace where there was even a little wind, he could get out of this damned place.

H chugged along all day and all night and all the next day. After about 35 hours his GPS told him he had come south over 180 miles. It might be enough because a gentle breeze had come up.

He shut down the engine when there was enough wind to just barely move and he turned so that the boat was going southwest rather than straight south. He wasn't in the Antarctic by any stretch, but he was southern enough to grab some of it's global wind effect.

The next morning he headed straight east as he did not want to go any further south, it was getting cool at night. His cruise had been planned so that he was in warm waters and he had few warm clothes.

He hoped that he didn't get becalmed again. He had used up about 15 gallons of his fuel. He had plenty enough to pull in and out of several ports but he worried about getting clean fuel to replace the fuel he had used. Marine engines were notoriously finicky about dirt and water in the fuel. He knew that he was going to have to do serious maintenance on the engine if it got fouled.

Nine days later he was sailing along under a stiff breeze and noticed the barometer had dropped quite a bit overnight. He rigged the storm jib and left it in it's bag tied down on deck. That way he could furl the mainsail and jenny and quickly pull the storm jib up. He had an extra steel wire up forward for the storm jib and normally it was disconnected at the deck.

The Genoa or jib was a roller furling type so he couldn't hank on a storm jib to the forward stay because it was covered by his Genoa.

A roller furling jib has a reel at the bottom of the forward stay and in port the sail is wound around the stay. The halyards are two ropes, one for pulling the sail out and the other for wrapping it around the stay with the spinning of the reel, this was known as furling. The main sail works in a similar way except it was rolled up inside the mast.

Why did he want a storm jib rather than just reefing (shortening) the main or jenny? If the wind blew it out he would loose a very important part of his boat. The Hunter 31 is 11 feet wide at the beam and 31 long so she would run better under a storm jib anyway. At least that was the theory. In the storms he had been in before she had handled well under the storm sail.

He pulled the bungy cords off the kayak where he had her lashed to the outside of the port lifelines and put the boat down below on one of the settees in the lounge. It was wedged between the table and the settee. He bungeed it to the table leg.