Half Way to Vanuatu

The last 24 hours have been very slow indeed. I haven’t totted up our daily run yet (I do that every day at mid-day) but I suspect it will be somewhere around the 50-mile mark, and not all of them towards our intended destination.

The wind has been fitful, with squalls of 30 knots and then lulls of nothing, which makes for a tiring time. We have only a little sail set so that we are OK in the squalls but that does leave us wallowing the rest of the time. The wind has also backed so that it is coming directly from where we want to go. Rather than putting a lot of energy into beating up-wind we are simply waiting for it to back further (which it’s due to do any time now) and then we’ll be able to tack and make for Vanuatu.

As of now, 0900 on Monday July 9th (UTC+12) we are almost exactly half way. Our position is 26 22.7S 171 19.7E. If the wind does what the forecasts say it will
we should be looking forward to a relatively fast and comfortable second half of the passage.

In other news we are pleased to once again have access to fresh fish. It’s something we didn’t know we would miss until we were no longer to get it easily in New Zealand, and which we had become accustomed to eating frequently in The Islands. We caught a smallish Mahi Mahi two days ago and have been enjoying that. I’ll put the lines out again as we approach Vanuatu over the New Hebrides Trench and with luck we’ll get something else. With a lot of luck it’ll be a Yellowfin Tuna 🙂

We get asked a lot of questions about provisions. “How do you provision?” Or “How long can you stay at sea?” Well, the truth is that provisioning for us is not that much more difficult than anyone else’s weekly grocery shop. We have a small fridge so we can’t buy large quantities of stuff that needs to be refrigerated and we don’t have the option of nipping down to the corner shop for another loaf of bread, but in all other respects it’s pretty similar.

The answer to the second question is a little more complex. We tend to stock up on non-perishable goods whenever we encounter them being sold at a good price. We left Panama with about thirty bottles of rum. We left Marquesas overflowing with fruit. We’ve left New Zealand full of canned goods and good-quality pasta and rice that we trust won’t go weevilly as fast as the stuff bought in the islands. At any one time we probably have about three months supply of food on board and enough water at the beginning of a passage for three weeks with no rationing beyond our normal conservational practices. We could catch rain water and we could fire up the water maker while on passage if we needed to. We fish periodically and it doesn’t usually take too long to catch something. One fish will last us for between 3 and 10 meals depending on it’s size. The answer, therefore, is that given the right set of circumstances (availability of rain and fish) we could, in theory, stay at sea indefinitely from a supplies perspective. Staying sane out here is the real challenge. Fortunately we seem to be quite good at helping one another with that.