30 22.6N / 162 52.1W
It's not that often that you get this close to a pelagic seabird. Usually, they're off in the distance doing flight cartwheels. They're a joy to watch and actually, out here in the big blue desert, they're often the only thing moving. It always lifts your spirits to see them. On day six of our passage from Hawaii to Alaska, it was windless with a totally flat sea to match. Without much wind for flying, the birds were bobbing around the boat instead. Beautiful to see them so close up. We don't have a bird book aboard, so, don't know which kind they were. In flight the wingspan looked to be around two metres!
The first four days of the passage were typical tradewind conditions, around 20 knots from the NE blowing constantly at the same velocity and direction. We didn't touch the sails for four days. We've only had conditions like this once or twice before, so, it was a joy to start the passage this way. The wind soon died. Days 5-6 were spent moving at about 1-2 knots, but, we weren't complaining, at least we weren't stopped dead with the sails slatting. Overnight on day six we decided to stop for a while. There was a large, deep and nasty low-pressure system hovering over us. We had been watching it come towards us since day 1 and knew we would intersect at some point. We didn't want to get in the middle of it. It looks like we'll get the worst of it overnight tonight, but, it should only be a glancing blow along its bottom edge. After that, it's looking good again for getting more northing in.
Due to the calms, it wasn't a great week mileage-wise, but, not too bad, we've had worse. We sailed 680 miles, 516 miles were good to our destination (Kodiak), which started off 2,200 nautical miles away, only 1,684 to go. We'll be leaving the tradewind belt soon and move into an area where westerly winds prevail. In that area we will be able to travel more on the rhumb line, so, will hopefully make up some time.
Due to the light conditions, week 1 was relatively drama-free. There's always something though and this week was no exception. We use our generator a lot on passage and on day 4 (late in the evening of course) it just wouldn't start. It reported a 'fuel supply problem'. We spent three hours changing filters everywhere we could think of, bleeding injectors, manually priming the fuel lines, inspecting fuel pumps and starter motors etc...etc. Nothing worked. Then, G decided to use his 'magic wrench'. This is a tool that everybody should get. It's maybe not as good as a 'sonic screwdriver' (Dr. Who's favourite tool), but, this is the fourth time it has saved the day for us. You operate it by taking a medium-sized wrench and whacking the offending object as hard as you can with a short, sharp blow. One whack to the fuel pump and away it went. It has been running flawlessly ever since. In the past it has worked on our autopilot pump twice and our Yanmar starter once!
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