Wks 79-80: Pacific pt. 1

Sorry for the lack of updates! It will probably come as no surprise that the last few months have ended up a bit different than how we expected, but Serenity First and her crew have made it safely across the Pacific and we are currently anchored in Tahiti. We now have enough time, energy and WiFi to try to update the blog on what has been happening since we last ‘spoke’ and hopefully this can provide a positive distraction to the current global news cycle. This post is my review of the first half of our Pacific crossing and Laura will be following up with her own sequel to it. On top of this, we have compiled all of the text updates we shared during the crossing into a separate post – if you didn’t follow us that closely in the crossing and want to see how it unfolded in real time, then you can find that post here.

WARNING: Post contains fairly gross photos of an injured finger (due to popular demand)!

Captain’s log

Days 1-3: A fairly low-key start to the passage as we alternated sailing with motoring through some expected lulls, worked our way through the leftover Domino’s pizza (tasted even better on Day 3) and settled into passage life

Days 4-6: Started to benefit from some favourable current, which more than offset the lightening winds and provided some memorable days of spinnaker sailing either side of my birthday (that apparently necessitated some buckets of water over the head to mark the occasion). No nibbles on either line – where have all the fish gone?

Day 7: Crossed the equator and conducted a suitable ceremony to honour and thank Neptune, although the positive vibes were then overshadowed by the death of a visiting Galapagos finch (Finn), who was unable to find a good enough resting spot

Day 8-9: Slow going with lots of engine time as we worked our way across the doldrums (despite forecasts promising wind far earlier), but the good news was our second visiting finch was able to get some sleep and commenced what had the look of a successful return flight the next morning. We also got our first nibble, although the crafty mahi slipped the hook before we could get him aboard

Day 10: Landed the mother of all tuna (see story of the week below). Starting to get a bit concerned as to whether my finger has got infected or not, and the window to make the decisions on whether to return to Galapagos is starting to close.

Day 11-12: Well and truly found the trade winds and have been making great progress, fuelled by a combination of tuna, tuna and more tuna. Got some favourable advice from a doctor in UK that has eased fears about finger considerably and so have decided to push on for Marquesas.

Day 13-14: Started to hear some worrying news regarding the spread of COVID 19 and apparently the islands of the South Pacific are now debating shutting their borders! We are hoping our month long quarantine will grant us sailors an exemption, but we are certainly too far along now to turn back.

Story of the crossing

With no action on the fishing lines what-so-ever for the first week of our passage, we were starting to scratch our heads a bit on what we were doing wrong. We’d had some of our best fishing ever whilst in the Bay of Panama and couldn’t work out what had changed. We then got a bite on day nine that ended up escaping but restored our faith that there were still some fish out there. The next day we then encountered a ‘slightly’ larger specimen than any of us could of hoped for.

It was around two in the afternoon, and we were trying out some of the new lures that Daniel and Camille bought me for my birthday. Daniel was on watch, but the cry of ‘Fish On!’ was hardly necessary given the noise that was coming from the rail-mounted reel – the high pitched screeching noise had a similar effect of an air raid siren and was a clear indication that we had encountered something big. This was further confirmed when we realised that we had lost over half the line on the reel in the first minute alone.

Daniel and I started to frantically try to slow the reel down (try being the operative word) – we pushed the drag lever up to maximum and also twisted the drag knob up as far as we could with our fingers but it was making little difference and I was close to accepting that we would just have to cut the line and lose it with the lure. But then I figured we could try using some pliers to increase the drag more and by doing that we were able to slow the loss of line to a mere 10m a minute, although by this time we probably had less that 100m left on the reel.

With the situation now a bit more under control, we got the engine on and dropped the spinnaker, and then Daniel and I set to taking some line back anytime the fish paused to change direction. I couldn’t turn the reel handle with my finger, so I grasped the line off the drum and felt the weight so Daniel knew when to wind on. I was also able to lift the line slightly to create an oblique pull that created some slack similar to using a rod. By alternating these two techniques, we were able to start bringing in more and more line and slowly the fish came back towards Serenity.

We had about 500m of line out in the water, so it took us around 45 minutes of winding before we started to catch a glimpse of the fish. There hadn’t been any jumping and mahi are also limited in size so I had figured it was something else. The fact that it hadn’t dove suggested it wasn’t a shark (something other cruisers have caught on this journey). We then finally got a glimpse of a fat fish with some distinctive yellow fins that confirmed it was definitely a yellowfin tuna. We managed to work the fish to the aft of the boat (with Daniel doing most of the work as my finger was limiting how much I could participate) and it was clear that the fish was pretty tired from the fight; however, we know that they always give it a last hurrah when you get them aboard and this guy was big enough to do some serious damage to us or the boat if we weren’t careful.

So we tied a lasso around the line and then let it down towards the fish with them goal of letting it drift over the body so we could then pull it tight over the tail. This has worked in the past to help us control large fish; however, he was so big that we couldn’t get him that close to the boat, plus he was so large with these extended fins that meant coaxing the lasso down was hard. Laura was chosen as the most ‘southern’ American aboard that was likely to possess some cowgirl blood, and she got to work hanging off the back with her coil of line and an extendable boat hook. After a few attempts she was able to get the line on the fish and quickly we got the other end wrapped around the metal table legs to help us take the load.

It then took all four of us pulling on the rope to drag the fish up onto the transom at the back, at which point it started going nuts as expected and so Daniel and I both had to sit on it for around 10 minutes, until the mostly full bottle of vodka we poured into the gills was able to subdue it. If it had been any larger, we would have had to winch it aboard using a line running up to the top of the mast, but this would have got fish everywhere over the decks so that was definitely a win. Even so, there was so much fish over the instruments and the back of the cockpit that it took us around two days to fully clean up.

I could only supervise the filleting as we were trying to keep my hands dry to stop any infection in my finger, so Daniel and Camille took the lead. The skin was like armour in places and thick enough all over to be like cow leather. We had to resort to serrated diving knives to get through it, and then switched to our largest chefs knives to carve the fillets free. It took another hour to get each of the top fillets off the fish, which filled 11 large ziplock bags with tuna steaks, at which point Laura announced that we were out of fridge and freezer capacity. It was sad to throw the fish back with so much meat left on it; however, the lure was not sized to catch such a monster, and he wasn’t going to make it if we had freed him at the back of the boat, so this was the best option and I’m sure some other fish in the area ate well that night as a result.

We weren’t able to weigh the fish for obvious reasons, but based on his length and height the internet tells us he was probably between 130-150 lbs! We were able to get four of the bags of fillets frozen, but the other seven could only be refrigerated and so ended up eating tuna for lunch and dinner for the next ten days to ensure it didn’t spoil. By the end it was taxing our creativity to keep it interesting, but we had some wonderful dishes along the way of which Laura’s fish cakes made with instant mash potato were a particular highlight.

Parting thoughts on the Pacific crossing

Laura will be providing the details on the second half of the crossing (spoilers: we made it!), but we’ve decided to capture our own broader reflections on the crossing as a whole at the end of these posts. Comparing and contrasting our Atlantic and Pacific crossings is an interesting exercise as they had a lot less in common that I had expected. Obviously the Pacific was a longer crossing (even if all the Atlantic legs are summed together), but it was surprising how many other factors differentiated the two journeys.

On the positive side of things, the weather conditions were both more benign and more stable, which reduced a lot of the sailing stress. Whilst a bit more wind would have been nice at times, overall it meant that most watches required little input from the on-watch crew, and the boat motion was easier for everyone on board. A side effect of this was that the twin rigged headsails we’d spent so much time setting up rarely got used (as they needed more wind from a more easterly direction), but thankfully the investment in a spinnaker and pole that we made in Croatia all those months ago paid off as it as by far the most helpful sail to deal with the conditions we experienced.

There was also a lot less stress regarding the maintenance of the boat, in part due to the less taxing conditions we experienced; however, I suspect that all the time and energy that the whole crew had put into the preventative maintenance before we left Panama was the more dominant cause. This meant that we were only distracted in the final week by concerns with critical equipment, which freed us up in the rest of the passage to spot and address minor issues before they became more serious. As an example, almost all boats that make this crossing lose at least one rope to chafe, but we were able to find and protect all the problems areas before major damage occurred.

In terms of specific features of the crossing there was only one main negative to offset these upsides, which was the increased difficulty of the routing strategy. There was almost no geographic variation in conditions for our Atlantic crossing, which meant routing was solely focused on balancing the most direct route with boat comfort. The Pacific was a far more complex problem to solve, as there were significant differences in wind and also in current to try to factor in. At one level, I enjoyed the challenge of developing strategies to take best advantage of the various forecasts we received, but it did make the role of skippering more stressful as there were many more opportunities to make a bad decision (i.e. ones that would increase our overall crossing time). Thankfully, the crew were very supportive (and so this stress was almost entirely self-imposed), and on top of this I was taken out of the cooking rota entirely, which gave me a good amount of time to engage with this area (side note: the performance from the galley was a massive step up on the Atlantic, for which Laura deserves major plaudits but I’ll leave the details for her post).

As such, if there hadn’t been any external sources of stress, we would probably have considered the Pacific crossing to have been significantly easier than the Atlantic. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The first half of the crossing, Laura and I were permanently distracted by the risk of infection to my finger. Whilst it had progressed sufficiently to enable us to depart with some confidence, we were struggling to identify if the swelling and pinky red skin colour were indicative of an infection or just part of the normal healing process, and this dilemma peaked as we were passing the Galapagos. At this point, we were cleaning and redressing the finger every day and I was still taking the prescribed course of antibiotics, but this was due to run out in a few days and our emergency medical supplies were of a different type and would only give us an additional 10 days. As we were wrestling with the decision on whether to divert to Galapagos, Laura had the brainwave to reach out to one of our friends who is a doctor for the NHS. We apologetically emailed him a low res photo via sat phone, and given the circumstances he provided us with an amazingly detailed and balanced response that included a second opinion from a plastics surgeon! This was a turning point in giving us the confidence that I wasn’t being suicidal in proceeding with our crossing, and that everything appeared normal based on the information available – we owe him a massive debt of gratitude.

Just as that medical drama was receding, the next one came along, which you are all far more familiar with than us and I’ll leave the details for Laura’s upcoming post! Needless to say the uncertainty of what was happening and whether we would be allowed to make landfall in French Polynesia was another challenging mental strain that impacted us all throughout the rest of our passage, and when combined with the finger stress it certainly made the Pacific crossing for me feel like a greater overall challenge when compared to the Atlantic. I’m certainly grateful that we got to do them this way round, that our longest sail now is hopefully behind us and that we were able to complete it in the way that we did.