Tag: Pacific Puddle Jump

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The truth about food on boats

We dine like gods out here!

To give you an idea, I offer for your consideration this typical evening “crew ration”

Stuffed peppers, avocado, fresh tomato salad and hand-made garlic bread… All par for the course for our dining experience (trust me, were you here you would not dare to dishonor the glory of our consumption rituals by addressing them as “meals” either).  Any fool who told you that people lose weight on long voyages was either a liar or someone who did not give proper respect to the culinary creation process.  Translation:  they did not have a duty cook, which is one of the major advantages of having more than 2 people on your boat.

In this sailor’s opinion, Allan probably made the best call of his ship captaining career when he took our advice of assigning a duty cook.  He actually did it cunningly well.  We have 2 duty rotations each 12 hours in length: Day watch and night watch.  During night watch, each of us stands a 3 hour and during the day watch, three of us stand a 4 hour shift and the 4th person’s sole responsibility for the day is to make sure the rest of us eat meals that would make Bacchus envious.  Tiffany and Alison typically take this burden on and they have done a fantastic job.   The reason for this is that Allan and I have both stated that Ramen noodles and a can of coke every night sounds like a fun experiment.  Alison agreed with this idea, however her idea of Ramen noodles is a travesty of college gourmet cooking.

Back to the duty cook thing.  The real advantage here is that the cook easily spends 4 hours (the length of a watch) preparing lunch and dinner.  Everyone realizes this, so none of the other watchstanders feel like the cook is shirking duty.  Also, because the cook doesn’t have to worry about a watch during the day, they can spend a lot of time creating excellent meals, despite having to deal with problems straight out of Das Boat:

Also, this way no one gets overworked between standing watches and preparing meals.

The cooks almost got a fresh sushi reprieve when we landed our first fish of the trip until we realized it wasn’t a good “eating” fish (what the heck else are fish good for!?)

– Greg

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Repelling Air Pirates!

Our last communication ended with our loyal crew recovering from a blitzkrieg-style home invasion from the booby birds.

Tiffany, Allan and I quickly devised a counter-strike offensive.  Luckily, between Tiff’s years of nautical experience, Allan’s fighter-jock skills (no, really – F-16s!…these birds seriously picked the wrong boat to mess with…) and my supreme knowledge of the multiple uses of sailing line we routed the enemy and chased him squawking into the night.

With the main thrust of their attacked repelled, their forces routed and in shambles, the enemy made a final, desperate play for a beachhead on our extremely delicate solar panels, which our reserve forces quickly repelled.

Unfortunately they kept coming back, growing so bold as to land on the boat hook as we attempted to poke them with it!  Eventually, with both sides weary from literally hours of intense non-stop action, our side proposed a truce: One bird on the dingy, as long as no one poops.  Of course he defecated easily twice his own body weight onto our small boat and at first light his fellow bombers attempted to join him, so we rejoined the battle this time determined to offer no quarter…

Though we survived the brutal hand-to-halyard combat of that night, our boat still carries the scars of the battle …

… and, as you can see from that video,  we must remain constantly vigilant for skirmisher forces lying in wait to catch us unawares.  For we are alone, cut off from other allied units, hundreds of miles from shore and should our efforts fail, we would be overtaken before help could arrive.  There is no truce, no peace.  That is the lesson the “night of the attack of the boobies” taught us.  A lesson we pass to you, my friends, from the front lines.  Pray for us as we battle on…

– Greg

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Attack of the boobies!

Ladies and gentlemen, today I am here to talk to you about the perils of boobies.  (no, we are not about to talk about pre-marital sex here.  It’s the name of a bird dude.  As in blue-footed boobies (or orange-footed, whatever)).

Don’t let the cuteness fool you.  These little warm weather aviary ambassadors of the devil himself have been with us since our departure.   My friends, as the crewmember with the most seaborne combat experience (hey, I am a trained boarding officer) I have led our valiant efforts to repel these determined air pirates for several days now.  Though our first attempts were admittedly crude and pathetically unsuccessful.

We only suffered a minimum of self-inflicted casualties …

… and have recently upgraded our techniques.   The scales of victory slowly tipped in our direction and our safe voyage appeared assured…until the enemy, under the cover of darkness, marshaled their forces and without warning staged their own personal Tet Offensive…

The enemy struck without warning, on all fronts and we were initially clearly overwhelmed.  Pressing the advantage one of our foes grew so brave as to land in our cockpit and make a dive for the hatch below decks! Allan had to literally tackle this squawking, flapping Captain Jack Sparrow-wanna-be with a rug while Alison pelted them both with a fruit basket (more friendly fire) and cast the beast from our vessel into the murky darkness. (sorry, no video on that one, happened a little too fast.)

The battle rages on…

– Greg

(On another booby note, we ran into someone with a t-shirt that said “I love boobies” and a cartoon of 2 little blue booby feet on it 🙂 – Tiff)

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To Cross the Pacific

Ah the happy crew of the good ship FLY AWEIGH, decked out in their 2010 puddle jump regalia.  We figured we should get the pictures handled before the scurvy set in.

For those of you who don’t know, the term “puddle jump” is the name people use to describe the trip we are undertaking by sailing from Mexico to Tahiti in French Polynesia.

Our first 30 minutes underway we received an interesting omen of things to come.

At least we got our man overboard drill out of the way first thing…is it a bad sign if the mop sank to the bottom before we recovered it?

Having made our sacrifice to King Neptune’s housekeeping staff, we rapidly shifted gears into that most critical of all getting underway rituals: Calling everyone you know for the obligatory rushed goodbye call

It’s great to finally be underway and heading somewhere new.  Now, don’t get me wrong, Mexico has been a blast and La Cruz has earned a special place in my heart.   I mean between bar cats taking my sodas, swarms of butterflies covering mountaintops,  all the great people we met, and lets not forget Mexican car horns or my breakout role in the made for Sci-fi movie SHARKTOPUS (this October kids, mark your calendars!) Mexico has most assuredly been a good time.  (PS, for if you missed any of the above, check the previous posts.)  However, I would hate to come back to the states and have the following conversation:

Friend: “Where you been?”

Me: “Oh, I’ve been traveling around the world.”

Friend: “Wow cool!  Where did you go?”

Me: “Mexico.”

A drastically unfair prejudice formerly held by myself is that Mexico is “right next door.”  SOME of Mexico (read Tijuana and some desert) is in fact next door and a lot of Mexico is freaking far, far away.  Tiff and I sailed for weeks straight and I would say we got about half way down one coast.  A lot of cruisers sail Mexican waters for years and never get bored or move on…and I can see why.

I feel that Tiff and I are becoming well known here in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle.  We have friends, the owner of the local British pub doesn’t even need to ask me what I’ll be having when I come in, a Guinness and fish & chips just show up (which is awesome, by the way).  I think Tiff and I stopped being tourists here a few weeks ago and actually started living here.  This is great feeling and we either need to buy a house or move on.  Since there is a lot more world out there and the idea was to go around it, its time to move on.  I am nervous though that Allan’s prediction may be closer to the mark than any of us are willing to admit.

Besides the idea of crossing the largest expanse of nothing on the planet in what my friend Michael describes as, “a glorified bathtub with a big bedsheet on front” intrigues me.  Though I would also like to point out this “glorified bathtub” comes decked out with basically every electromechanical toy you could possible want, not to mention private guest quarters with attached bathrooms and showers!  If you don’t know boats too well, allow me to assure you, this is the lap of luxury when it comes to crewing.

Whelp, here we go…

(Imagine that video was your last sight of solid ground for a month straight…)

– Greg

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We’re Going to Tahiti

Tiffany and I got ourselves a ship for the trip to Tahiti! Our friends Allan & Alison on FLY AWEIGH have decided to change their plans from sailing to Florida to sailing instead to Australia. Those of you following the blog for a while now will remember Allan and Alison from our many adventures in Baja Mexico, in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Mazatlan and now Puerto Vallarta. They have asked Tiffany and I to accompany them over the first leg of the journey, basically to help them sail their boat over 3000 miles of open ocean … one of the largest expanses on the planet.

To give you an idea of what we have signed on for here, imagine driving from New York City to San Diego in a camper. Now reduce the camper’s speed to 10 miles per hour max, make it impossible to get off or stop the camper at any point during the voyage, remove all signs of life, habitation, fuel or help for your journey and put 4 people in the camper, one of whom must be driving at all times and two of which are vegetarians. Sprinkle in the potential for a few natural disasters and add a dab of motion sickness. Oh yeah, no cell phones, wifi or FM radio either. That’s not quite it, but it’s at least close to what we’re doing.

(Ok, this time Greg made a comparison to a camper van. Last time, he said we were “crossing the ocean in a bathtub powered by a bedsheet”…)

Naturally, prepping for this trip was a major project for the four of us and took us about a month to get FLY AWEIGH, an already well equipped and well maintained ship, ready for the journey.

How do I describe to you what we did to prepare our ship and ourselves for this undertaking? I mean, how many bottles of bleach does one need to cross an ocean?

And how many hours a day should you devote to the important task of de-moisturizing your mushrooms for storage?

We also got 2 new sails for the trip: a storm trysail in case of hurricanes and a spinnaker in case of light winds. Thanks go out to Mike of PV sailing who got the sails down to Mexico and took the time to do some training with us on them.

Overall it was a lot of work and the four of us all pitched in and made it a good time. This video gives you an idea of what it is like to prepare a ship to cross an ocean:

Another important factor in our preparation was mentally preparing ourselves for what I estimated would be 30 days living in a constantly moving 400 sq foot apartment with no means of leaving. Now the idea of unplugging for a month may sound rather appealing at first but, as I learned from my patrols in the Coast Guard, you have to keep busy or you’ll go bonkers after a while. To that end I had Tiffany bring back a few things for me from the states: a French review program (because in French Polynesia, that’s what they speak! – Tiff), an audio Bible and a ukulele. In our final month in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle here in Banderas Bay, I’ve managed to learn one song on this thing.

So either I’ll get better or they’ll kill me and dump my body in the ocean. Nothing like a little motivation to begin one’s musical career. Anyone know what song I was playing?

-Greg

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Links from speech

This post is for the people from the SAR speech at La Cruz marina.  Hello and welcome to our little corner of the internet!  Please have a look around and check out our video blog below!

As promised, below are the links I mentioned in the speech:

The link to register your EPIRB:

http://www.beaconregistration.noaa.gov

The link to the USCG SAR addendum (638 page download in adobe, be forewarned 😉

http://www.uscg.mil/directives/cim/16000-16999/CIM_16130_2E.pdf

Would you like the Ditch bag & DC kit list I mentioned in the speech?  Comment on this post and let us know you want a copy and we’ll send it to you.

I can also email you the notes from “top 10 things sailors can do in 10 minutes to help the Coast Guard find them” I presented last Wednesday in Paradise Village.

If you have any questions, or would like to know more about how to best use your safety gear, or if you’d like me to come by and take a look at your gear, feel free to call me after the morning net call sign “Coast Guard Couple” or send me an email (contact info is in my sailing resume).

Also, if you know of anyone looking for a good crew, please refer them to this website and our sailing resumes & testimonials located in the margins of this page.  Thanks a lot and we’ll see you out in the Pacific!

-Greg Norte

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