Hilton Head Island: returned

 

I turned around because I ran out of wind and then I ran out of patience.  There is more to it than that and I will write about it after giving it some more thought.  It seems there is more interest in my turning back than there often has been in my completing a voyage.

Here is a screen shot of my noon positions Sunday-Tuesday, Feb.2-4.  Sunday is upper right.  Monday lower right.  Tuesday left.  The Tuesday position is 16 miles from Monday and 14 miles from Sunday.

This passed me about 400 miles.  The proper way to make a passage.

And here I am eight or nine days out.

I reached the slip at 6 pm yesterday and am still feeling the little boat’s quick motion now sixteen hours later.  I am moving slowly and my body is still filled with aches.  Sailing Moores is strenuous and I may have to accept that at 83 I am old.

Good to be home.

Hilton Head Island: ready

I am back from making the final preparations on GANNET,  The electric outboard is mounted and it started.  The water containers are filled, though not to the top.  Probably about 4 gallons in each for a total of 24 gallons.  Far more than I expect I will need.  Everything is stowed and the bags along the sides of the v-berth tied in place.  We should leave the slip tomorrow morning.  I will activate the Yellowbrick which I have set to transmit our position automatically every six hours.  The tracking page is:

https://my.yb.tl/gannet

Do not be alarmed if some days you see us making slow or no progress or even going backwards.  Headwinds are due Thursday or Friday and depending on their strength and the sea state I will reduce sail significantly and possibly heave to.

Wishing you well from the unfrozen marsh.

Hilton Head Island: ice bird

 

Carol and I walked to GANNET early this afternoon.  The temperature is 56F/13C, so finally there is significant melting.  The bike path is almost entirely clear.  A narrow strip on the north side of the pier out to the marina is clear and, thankfully the ramp down to the docks, which is often steep depending on the state of the tide, is clear.  The docks still have patches of melting snow and ice, but are not dangerous if walked with care.  When we reached the little boat I thought she was free of snow and ice until I stepped on board and glanced back.  I was able to lift that almost solid block and create ice bergs in Skull Creek.

Long time readers will know that I extremely dislike doing things at the last minute, but this rare snow storm has caused me to.  I was ready so long ago that I have had to charge devices and the Evo batteries again.  I have a duffle bag of cold weather clothes and small items to take down tomorrow.  I will also fill the water containers, fit and test the outboard, and arrange final stowage.  In normal conditions I would have done all that, except fit the outboard, days ago and be sitting around tomorrow glancing at my completed list from time to time, making certain I had forgotten nothing.  Sometimes you just have to adapt.

Hilton Head Island: SPIRIT OF SAILING and thawing

 

A few weeks ago Ray Chang left a comment that he had seen my best known line in a book, THE SPIRIT OF SAILING, of photographs taken by Michael Kahn.  He sent me an image of the page, but it was too small to reproduce here.  I was curious, so I went to Amazon and found the book and being a big spender bought a copy for less than $8.  It arrived today and it is indeed a book of beautiful photographs and fine words.  I am in very good company.  Thank you, Ray, for bringing THE SPIRIT OF SAILING to my attention.

With temperatures never rising much above freezing for the past three days, the snow that fell Tuesday night was still mostly with us this morning in the form of ice.  The driveway into our complex is clear and we decided to go to the supermarket.  This was the first time either of us has gone farther than to take the trash out since Tuesday.  Parking here is outside and we found Carol’s car with 2” of ice on the windshield.  With the help of the defroster and a plastic scoop we managed to clear it and off Carol drove.  The streets are clear except for a few places permanently in shade.  The temperature is now 50 and due to be warmer tomorrow.  I still see snow on the marina docks, but I hope to get to GANNET tomorrow, and if the forecast continues unchanged to sail Tuesday morning.

Hilton Head Island: icebound; credo annodated

I am icebound.  Our temperature has remained mostly below freezing.  Now in midafternoon Thursday it is 37.  So there has not been much melting and what little has melted froze overnight.  I read that Hilton Head Island received four inches/10 cm of snow.  As I reported we have only about an inch on this side of the building.  There is more on the side facing east. 

I considered walking down to GANNET today, but I can see that the docks are still covered with snow that I expect has turned to ice, so I won’t.  

There have been some amusing emails from the Plantation Home Owners’ Association in response to questions as to when the streets will be cleared.  The answer is when the sun does so.   Do people really expect that equipment will be invested in and kept to be used twice in thirty years?  Apparently some do.  

If the forecast is correct the melt will come this weekend and I may sail for Culebra next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Last evening I reread for the first time in a long time the Credo on my main site.  I got it mostly right.  Even if you have read it, I think it is worth reading again now sixteen years later and see what has changed.  New comments are in parentheses. 

2009

   

    A gibbous moon directly above the masthead illuminates THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s white deck and white asymmetrical spinnaker as she slides across a dark sea.  We are three weeks and a day out of Panama.  Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands is a week and a day or two ahead.  

    I take a cup of tea and sit on deck.  I cherish these nights.  I’m 67 years old.  (Now 83.)  This is my fifth circumnavigation.  If there is ever a sixth, it will be in the Southern Ocean and via Cape Horn again.  (I was wrong.  Perhaps if there is a seventh.) One way or the other there won’t be that many more nights gliding before the trades.  (Wrong again.  There were many more tradewind nights sailing GANNET.)

    Once when being interviewed I was asked what in one word sailing means to me, and my instant reply was, “Freedom.”

    I’ve wondered about that since then.  I am after all free enough on land.  I stopped working for other people and owing money in 1974.  But I never feel as free on land as I do at sea.

    Part of that freedom is escape.

    I grew up in a suburb of Saint Louis, and I didn’t want to be there.     My fellow Missourian, Mark Twain, said that all adventure begins with a book and with running away from home.  Mine certainly began with books, and Carol, my wife, says I am still running away from home.  That isn’t quite true.  Boats have been my home of choice during most of my adult life, and the time I spend ashore is the willing compromise I have made for love.

    Other than freedom from Missouri, sailing is freedom from the restrictions, regulations, and banal, ubiquitous ugliness of modern urban life.  Those restrictions and cluttered ugliness are always there; and they seem only to increase.  Beauty can be found in cities, but as isolated oases glimpsed between telephone poles, billboards, and graceless buildings.  (I still find modern urban life and cities ugly, but I have found a place to live in tranquility and surrounded by beauty here overlooking Skull Creek.)

    And sailing is freedom to.  To a world that is simple, direct, as beautiful as this soft night, uncompromising, and unsentimental.  

    The sea is not cruel or merciless.  The sea is insensate and indifferent.  It is what you make of it and of yourself.  A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind.  The sea is the canvas; a still, with a few exceptions, pristine canvas.  

    I love the beauty of the open ocean.  I love not hearing news of greedy financiers and self-serving politicians.  (Truer even now than then.). I love that the only sounds for the past three weeks have been the wind, and the water, and the music I have chosen to play.  I love feeling THE HAWKE OF TUONELA move in perfect balance through waves.  I love having the clear-cut responsibly for myself and my actions. 

    Sailing across oceans is not always this easy.  Nor should it be.  I’ve been in Force 12 conditions eight times and put the mastheads of three of my boats, including this one, in the water. (Now four.)  I know HAWKE’s masthead was in the water because everything up there--the tricolor running light, the Windex, the instrument system wind transducer--was torn off.  (As it was three times on GANNET.)  

    To allay fears, all of these incidents except one took place in the Southern Ocean, and the exception was a cyclone in the Tasman Sea.  Avoid the tropical storm seasons and you can sail forever in the trade winds without ever encountering even Force 10.  But I do think that you should be willing to face a gale before you set off across an ocean.

    Sailing in the tropics is pleasant, but it isn’t enough for some.  The Southern Ocean has its own cold fierce beauty, with albatrosses whose wing spans equal the beam of this boat (They far exceed GANNET’s beam.)  and jagged seascapes like mountain ranges. 

    Long ago I wrote, “Define a man, then, by that against which he must strive.”  When I was young I looked around and saw that the biggest thing on this planet is the ocean.  So it has been that against which I have chosen to strive.

    That is perhaps the greatest of sailing’s freedoms:  the freedom to be myself.

Hilton Head Island: whiteness and speed

I am rereading MOBY DICK for the third or fourth time and by chance am at Chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale.  Glancing up I see unaccustomed whiteness.

Rain turned to sleet and snow after sunset and continued for part of the night.  By the time I woke at 6:30 the front had moved offshore.  We have only an accumulation of about an inch/2-3 cms, but the temperature is well below freezing and it will last a while.  We have no reason to go anywhere and won’t.

I was surprised this morning to see a boat underway.  A 35’ ketch was powering slowly up Skull Creek from the south.  She seems a cruiser with solar panels and a lot of stuff on the deck that most cruisers feel a need to carry and towing a rigid dinghy.  Through binoculars I saw she had fenders out and that there were two people in the cockpit.  As I expected she was heading for the marina after a cold night at anchor somewhere along the creek.  I watched her tie up to a snow covered dock.  I haven’t seen anyone else moving about in the marina and I don’t plan on going down there until the snow is gone.  GANNET’s mast is still where it should be.

I have been thinking more about boat speed.  

On all my boats a limiting factor has been when the boat started moving more quickly than whatever self-steering system I was using could control.  I have very seldom been willing to sit at the tiller and steer for long out of sight of land.  An exception was the day rounding Cape Horn in EGREGIOUS and later on that same five month long passage when EGREGIOUS encountered by far the strongest wind I have ever experienced south of Australia.  Off Cape Horn I steered all day.  Off Australia only a few hours.  I remember thinking then that it was too bad no one would know I had gotten so far before being killed.

I do not remember the exact boat speeds EGREGIOUS made under bare poles off Cape Horn and did not record it in STORM PASSAGE.  In the storm off Australia she was making 9 and 10 knots under bare poles.  She had no electrical system, but did have, as did CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, a self-powered boat speed indicator.

CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE’s best day’s runs were between 146-149 miles.  Her boat speed indicator readout stopped at 10 knots.  In the storm that drove us around Tahiti in winds recorded at 54 knots in Papeete Harbor, CTs boat speed indicator was often pegged at 10 knots.

I have had only three or four 200 mile days and they all came on RESURGAM at about the same location near the Equator a thousand or fifteen hundred miles west of Panama on passages to the Marquesas though a circumnavigation apart.  An Equatorial counter current runs there and it aided the day’s runs.  RESURGAM was reaching both times.  Once with the wind on the beam, once with it slightly forward.

I goggled She 36 to check my memory and found what I am reasonably certain wrong information, including that they displace 14,000 pounds and have a 29’ waterline.  Finally on the Sparkman and Stevens, who designed the boat, site I found what tallies with my memory, a waterline of 26’ and a displacement of 10,500 pounds.  She 36s were ¾ Tonners under the then IOR racing rule.  Those numbers are consistent with the ¾ ton rating of 24.5.  Both EGREGIOUS and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA were One Tonners with ratings at the time of 27.5.  They had about 30’ waterlines and should have been about a half knot faster than RESURGAM.  However I found that I made passages as fast or faster in RESURGAM than I did in the bigger boats because she was so well designed that the self-steering vanes—Aries on EGREGIOUS and RESURGAM; Monitor on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA— could control her longer and get her closer to her potential maximum speed than they could the other boats.

I also find online varying weights for Drascombe Luggers, from more than 800 pounds/362 kilos to 600 pounds/272 kilos.  Whichever a very light boat— one of the lightest if not the lightest to be sailed across the Pacific and the Indian Oceans—and with very little wetted surface.  She must have accelerated quickly, but my impression is that I have never had a boat that accelerates as quickly as GANNET.  We are sailing at 6 or 7 knots, pick up a little more wind or a wave and instantly we are doing double digits.  The highest speed I have observed on her is 13.7 knots.  I was hand steering sailing one morning inside Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in Far Northern Queensland with the asymmetrical set.  We may have gone faster.  I was not constantly looking at the Velocitek.  Around noon I got hungry and engaged the tiller pilot, hoping it could handle the little sloop long enough for me to duck below and grab something to eat.  It couldn’t.  I was no sooner in The Great Cabin than we broached and GANNET was on her side.  Struggling to the companionway I was able to reach the continuous line controlling the asymmetrical furling gear and got the flogging sail furled, GANNET back on her bottom, set the jib which the tiller pilot could handle, and proceeded on our way.  Those who race Moore 24s reach speeds approaching, perhaps exceeding 20 knots.  I like going fast, but I also like to get to the other side.

Hilton Head Island: doldrums and average speed

Recently two comments have been made to journal entries that I believe deserve to be answered here.

First, David asked:  My apologies for the off topic question on this post. I believe I read that your prefer sailing boats with no motor. How did you handle the doldrums when you were circumnavigating. If you’ve written about this before, where can I find it? Thanks.

And on another entry the ubiquitous Anonymous asked:  I seem to remember that you wrote either in some article, or here in your blog, what the average speed was for each circumnavigation.  Is that something you have posted?

Here is the response to the question about the doldrums.

I don’t know that I have ever specifically written about this, but the answer is that I sailed through them. The key is having a boat that sails well, and sailing performance has always been a high priority with me. 

Without going back and counting, I think I have crossed the Equator and therefore the doldrums, properly called the Intertropical Convergence Zone, but I prefer doldrums, 13 times on five different boats from the 18’ CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE to two 37’ers, EGREGIOUS and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA., Two of these boats were engineless as essentially is GANNET with her electric outboard having a range of around 6 miles, but even on RESURGAM and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA which had inboard diesels I never powered any significant distance at sea. 

The doldrums are not an area of zero wind, but of inconsistent and variable wind. In the early days of sail they stopped ships because the ships did not sail well to windward and often had foul bottoms.

If there is no wind, I wait until it returns.

You can find details of my transiting the doldrums in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA on my fifth circumnavigation in THE FIFTH CIRCLE

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/books.html

and in GANNET 

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/logs.html

Upon more careful review I have in fact crossed the Equator and doldrums 14 times.  Twice on each of my six circumnavigations and twice on my first two unsuccessful attempts to reach Cape Horn.  Once on the way south from San Diego.  Once on the way north after a repeat of rigging damage in the Southern Ocean.

Of average speeds, I vaguely remember calculating it for my first circumnavigation, but that was almost fifty years ago.  It is not in STORM PASSAGE and probably was published in a long forgotten magazine article.

I only have numbers for my last two circumnavigations.  The fifth from Opua, New Zealand to Opua, in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, and my sixth from San Diego, California, to San Diego in GANNET.

The numbers and daily runs for THE HAWKE OF TUONELA can be found at the end of her passage log.

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/

The circumnavigation took 193 days and 10 hours.

The total distance of her daily runs was 23,992 nautical miles.

Rounding the days to 193.5 and the miles to 24,000, the average daily noon to noon run was 124.03 miles for an average speed of 5.13 knots.

THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s best day’s run was 171 miles.  Her best week was 1111 miles.  And she had 6 more than 1000 mile weeks.

GANNET’s circumnavigation took 282 sailing days.

The total distance was 29989 miles.

Rounding the distance to 30,000 miles, her daily average was 106.4 miles for an average speed of 4.43 knots.

GANNET’s best day’s run was 180 miles.  She had only one thousand mile week.  That was 1002 miles.  She had 4 weeks of more than 900 miles.

As always these numbers are less than what the boats actually did because I measure day’s runs as straight line distance between noon positions and often sail more than that over the bottom and because many of the counted days were not full twenty-four hours, such as at the beginning and end of each passage and when anchoring every night day sailing inside Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The key to having a good daily average is not as much in going fast as in avoiding going slow and GANNET had a terribly slow final leg from Panama to San Diego which included five of the six slowest weeks of her entire circumnavigation.

I hope this answers your questions and you find the numbers of interest.  I enjoyed compiling them.

Hilton Head Island: Moore acceptance words; snow; a final death poem

To call this a speech seems excessive, but these are the words I spoke on being inducted into the Moore 24 Hall of Fame.

When I received Karl’s email about this honor I was particularly pleased because it comes from a group of sailors I admire and respect.

People usually divide those who sail into cruisers and racers.  I am neither.  I am just a sailor.  I have received some approbation from cruisers.  I appreciate receiving some from racers.

As we all know George Olson and Ron Moore created a masterpiece.  I doubt that George Olson when he designed the boat or Ron Moore and his crew when they laid up hull number 40 in 1979 ever imagined that it would sail around the world.  It is to their credit as honorable designer and builder that  GANNET could.

I have considered whether I may have misused GANNET, circumnavigating in a boat intended to race around buoys, but I believe the essence of sailing is to experience joy and in that I have not misused the little sloop for she has brought me great joy and I know will again.  I am sailing to the Caribbean in the next week or so, and if I am still alive and in good health when I turn 85 at the end of next year, GANNET and I will embark on a longer voyage.

So I thank you for this honor and wish you joy.

The amount of snow and sleet expected continues to be widely different between forecast sources, but all agree that Hilton Head Island will have some snow and sleet this coming Tuesday and Wednesday.  

To put this in perspective the last snow fell here in 2018.  You may find online that it fell in 2017.  That is wrong.  Incorrect information on the Internet?  How is that possible?  I know it is wrong because we closed on this condo seven years ago in January 2018.  We flew back to Evanston and were there when it snowed on Hilton Head.  According to the Internet, perhaps accurately, the previous snowfall prior to that was in 1989.  

I have sailed in snow.  That was in EGREGIOUS approaching Cape Horn.  If I have to when caught at sea, I will again, but I will not leave port until the weather returns to something approaching normal.

I finished this rereading of JAPANESE DEATH POEMS with one which really is the end of such poems.  If I live long enough the book will come up and be read again.

For myself I deplore saying someone has been lost or that they have passed.  Face up to it.  They have died and as Toko understood what they were no longer is.

Hilton Head Island: GANNET’s circumnavigation days sailed; What?!!

Yesterday I was asked how many miles GANNET sailed during her circumnavigation.  I knew I had added up her daily runs to a total of about 30,000 and thought I had posted that, but in running a search of this journal cannot find it and it is not recorded in the passage log on the main site.  Finally I did find the Pages document and to be precise the number is 29,989 nautical miles.  I record day’s runs as the straight line distance between noon positions.  Obviously when I tack or gybe or otherwise deviate from the straight line I sail farther over the bottom but that is too complicated to keep track of, so 30,000 miles for GANNET’s circumnavigation is less than the actual distance she sailed.

Studying the list of her daily runs caused me to wonder about how many sailing days her circumnavigation took, so I added them up.

I began the circumnavigation on May 20, 2014 and completed it almost five years later on April 29, 2019.  However as you will see I sailed little two of those years.  In 2015 GANNET remained on a mooring in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands because I had to have physical therapy due to an injury to the rotator cuff in my left shoulder and because the Bay of Islands is my favorite place in the world to have a boat; and in 2018 when we bought this condo I sailed up from Marathon, Florida, where the little boat then was, and kept her here for the year.  During her time in the Bay of Islands I sailed GANNET locally and during her year here at Hilton Head Island I sailed locally and also up to St. Michael’s, Maryland, and back; but I don’t count those as part of the circumnavigation.

Here is the breakdown.

2014  San Diego to Bay of Islands                    56 days

2015  in Bay of Islands                                         0

2016  Bay of Islands to Durban                          96

2017  Durban to Marathon                                  80

2018  Marathon to Hilton Head Island                   4

2019  Hilton Head Island to San Diego                46

Total                                                                    282

That total may be a few days off due to partial days at the beginning and end of passages.

By comparison my first circumnavigation in EGREGIOUS took 202 sailing days which was then the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation in a monohull.  The record now is about a quarter of that.  My fifth circumnavigation in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA took 191 sailing days.  The EGREGIOUS voyage was completed in less than twelve months.  THE HAWKE OF TUONELA in eighteen months.  Obviously I am slowing down with age.

This is the forecast for the marsh next Wednesday.  I don’t know when I am ever going to get out of here.

Hilton Head Island: just add water; a fast climb; the end of the universe

 

I took a few more things down to GANNET yesterday afternoon and arranged stowage on the v-berth.  Other than putting on board last minute items, GANNET is ready to sail.  All I need to do is add water.  Inside.  There is already ample water outside.  I will carry thirty gallons in six 5 gallon containers.  Two of them are rigid jerry cans I used during the circumnavigation.  Four collapsible containers such as I used when sailing CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.  This is far more water than I need, so I will be extravagant and when I reach warm enough temperatures even take solar showers.

However I am stalled.

I have little confidence in long range forecasts—and I consider long range to be more than seventy-two hours—but I have been downloading GRIBs for more than a week and checking other weather apps, such as Windy, Apple, WeatherChannel, WindFinder Pro, and a new one, Sonuby, which I quite like, and there is considerable disagreement between them.  Above you see the European GRIB on top, the US below, projections for 7:00 PM EST Friday January 24.  Yesterday a departure next Tuesday or Wednesday seemed likely.  Now it doesn’t.  I want a favorable forecast at departure for forty-eight or preferably seventy-two hours and then I will adapt to whatever happens.  I do not see one in the next ten days.  

Of water I came across an article on the BBC site about how much water you need to drink?  According to recent research by the University of Aberdeen the amount needed is 1.5 to 1.8 liters a day.  That is almost exactly what I do on passages.  1.5 liters equals 0.39 of a gallon.  1.8 liters 0.47 a gallon.  I have long accepted a standard of a half gallon of fresh water a day, supplemented by other liquids, and on the GANNET circumnavigation repeatedly found that I actually consumed 0.37 a gallon of fresh water a day.

Now I know that most people are very, very busy.  I also know that they have a great deal to say because I see them constantly talking on their phones, even while walking dogs or riding bicycles, much less driving cars.  So it is clearly progress and a great step forward that someone has come up with a way to ‘conquer’ Everest without interfering with your busy and productive life.  So take a week off work, have an ‘adventure’, fly home and impress your friends, neighbors, and co-workers.  We are fortunate to live in an age of such heros.

This speaks for itself.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/climbers-gas-could-help-you-rocket-up-to-everest-summit-8wbh8p3bg

I have sought meaning.  I have not found it.  As I have written here before from my experience and reading all I think I know is that consciousness resists unconsciousness and DNA imposes imperatives that it be transmitted into the future.  So we are in a universe vast beyond imagination and at present understanding. At least mine.  I came across an article about ways the universe might end that I found interesting.  Not an immediate concern, but perhaps you will too.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/not-just-heat-death-here-are-five-ways-the-universe-could-end/