Marshalls to Alaska Days 1-3: Rongerik - Dolphins, Rainbows, and Sunshine to Start

Testing our immersion suits.  A bit too warm in the tropics but standard preparation for a cold water passage.

Greetings,

It is now our third evening at sea. I thought I was ready to compose an email on the first night watch, but my stomach quickly proved me wrong! Last night, there were just enough squally clouds on my otherwise clear and starry watch to keep me in the cockpit, and so now we are into the sunshine of Day 3 (and then the moonless, starriness of night 3, as this took longer than expected to write!)

Preparing to anchor.  The "stick" is to tension or ease the brake on our nicely oversized windlass.

On that note, I would suggest that you go grab a cuppa, as we have a lot of catching up to do!

Since I last wrote, we spent about 10 days at Rongerik Atoll, where we were able to take care of some maintenance issues, catch up on sleep, and enjoy a last stint of tropical activities with the kids.

Anyone watching our Predictwind tracker on our way north from Majuro would have seen that we seemed to be lurching and careening all over the place. This turned out to be because we had applied silver insulation to the ceiling panel above our Iridium GO device, which has an internal GPS antenna: the secondary effect of making the boat warmer was jamming our own signal! Needless to say, we removed this silver panel in Rongerik, and everything returned to normal for our tracker :)

You may remember that I spent Mothers' Day 'lying around' (rebedding dozens of deck fittings in the ceiling of our cabin). On Fathers' Day, it was Max's turn: he spent the day lounging on a duffel bag full of winter layers on the floor of the aft cabin, reaching the full length of his torso deep into our shaft compartment to deal with a diesel leak. It started the way many maintenance surprises do: he opened the compartment to change a filter for our water maker and was greeted with an unwelcome smell of diesel. Closer inspection revealed that our electric 'bleed pump' was leaking. Since we have a manual lift pump elsewhere on the engine, we were able to do without the faulty pump, but it was only valved into the system on one side. The used spare fitting that we had at hand to block the remaining hose turned out to look the same but have incompatible threads (a metric/imperial refit, we think) so we had to scavenge in our bolt tray for something suitable. We found exactly one bolt fat enough to fit, and with the proper fine threads - a lone titanium bolt that was unlike anything else in the tray (likely a spare to mount our genoa furler). Given that refitting the furler would never be an at-sea repair, we felt pretty safe in using this bolt with some thread lock to stop up the engine hose. As Max carried out the repair, the refrain 'we could have been at sea, we could have been at sea' kept going through my mind: had the pump waited a few more days to leak, Max would have been working in a compartment with moving steering cables, a spinning shaft, and lunging seas. Sometimes the randomness and relentlessness of these faults gets to me, but I always remind myself that somewhere there is a blessing in the midst of it all! At least we weren't at sea when this pump failed.

No people living on Rongerik but lots of creatures.

As ever with an old boat, the Fathers' Day Diesel Fix was but one of many jobs waiting for us. Others included re-filling our compass with lamp oil (it has a minor leak, and so this is a regularly occurring job, and now a standard teamwork effort between Max and Johnathan), and re-setting the gasket material on one of our hatches that had leaked while we were underway from Majuro. We used our water-towed generator on our way north, and found a big chafed patch near the propeller, so this needed at a minimum a new knot, and because we had another line available, we decided to replace the whole thing. It is a bit of a mystery to us as to why it was chafing (we have used it in that configuration many times before without issue) and we will check it regularly when we deploy it on this passage. The routine is usually to deploy the generator at night and fishing lines during the day, which gives a chance for daily inspections. We had inspected our off-shore jackets in Majuro, and deemed them suitable to wear for another season, but on inspection in Rongerik, they seemed to have aged again in the cupboard. We ended up treating them with the same waterproofing that we use on our Sunbrella bimini, and crossing our fingers that they will keep us warm and dry until we can replace them in Alaska.

Another pre-passage rigging check.

I gave the kids an arts & crafts teamwork project one afternoon: their job was to take silver bubblewrap and 3" fibreglass insulation, and make 'doors' for the forward head and V-berth that we can velcro to the walls once the boat starts to get cold. I enjoyed standing back and watching the measuring, cutting, and figuring that went on, and by the end of the afternoon, we had two doors ready, snuggly rolled up like silver bedrolls to keep them compact until they are needed. They each have a wide front piece to tape to the wall and a narrower thick piece that will exactly fit in the door. When the time comes, we will use sticky-back velcro to stick them up. We also gave Victoria the job of painstakingly cutting pieces of bubble wrap to the size of our hatches. These will be spritzed with water and the surface tension will keep the bubble wrap layer fastened to the hatches, which is purported to prevent condensation from building up once it gets cold. Time will tell, but anything will help :)

Max and I took the opportunity to pre-position the lines for our drogue so we wouldn't have to do it from scratch at sea, securing low-friction rings to the toe rails with spliced Amsteel for the lines to pass through on their way to the main cockpit winches. We now have a big bucket of line secured on our back deck, and a shorter coil of line secured to the port railing. An aside: if we get into conditions where the boat could potentially go dangerously fast, we would throw our drogue over the side on the main line, which would secure the drogue to our big starboard winch. We would then attach the second line to it with a rolling hitch and use the second line to center the drogue behind the boat and share the load onto the main port winch. The drogue would act like a drag chute, keeping Fluenta upright and steady in big following seas. We are also carrying a sea anchor which would be deployed off the bow on our anchor chain if the drogue fails or gives insufficient stopping power. We hope to stow all of this gear, unused and unneeded, when we get to Alaska, but it is nice to know it is at the ready if we need it.

Victoria and I each spent the better part of a day sewing. After hemming and taking in the waist on a pair of pants for Johnathan, I tried to convince my mom's old Kenmore sewing machine to stitch some bright orange webbing loops for us to use as sail ties for our staysail. Unfortunately some combination of operator error, thick UV thread, fat needle, and grit in the gears (despite a new oil job that morning) prevented this from happening, and after many frustrating tries, I gave up and turned to my trusty Speedy Stitcher, and had the three loops done in an hour. So it goes. We gave that machine to my mom for Christmas in 1976, so it has certainly worked its way through its share of thick fabrics over the years, and I suspect it just needs some kind of tune-up or adjustment after seven years at sea. As for Victoria, her job was to add a piece of extra velcro to the 'doors' of our rain enclosure. It turns out that Velcro is nasty stuff to sew (the prickles shred the thread) so she covered her work with a piece of plastic bag, and had no more issues :)

Our water towed generator line looking worse for wear.  I replaced it with some of the masses of spare line we carry.

And repairing our storm staysail as the grommets corroded away since the last inspection.

One other piece of emergency equipment that we added for this trip was a set of cold water Immersion Suits. We took an hour one afternoon to practice putting them on (as per the warranty requirements). We found it quite hilarious to be dressed as five floppy red penguins on the foredeck in the tropical sunshine!

I had had the 'cupboard shuffle' on my to-do list in Majuro, but it had been trumped by all the heavy maintenance I found myself doing instead, so in a 'better late than never' sprint, I shuffled all the food, clothing, and bedding stores around so that winter clothes and easy food would be close at hand, and summer clothes and raw ingredients would be more deeply buried. This only takes three lines to write, but it took me about three days to complete! Every can locker in the saloon was emptied, and the maximum number of instant soups and canned dinners were put there (divided between port and starboard so that on any tack we could make a quick meal). All my usual supplies (canned beans, tomatoes, corn, etc) were relegated to crates in the 'pantry' (aka forward head) for a time in the future when we feel like cooking again. The winter duvets were aired and put into duvet covers, the four big Fiji throw cushions where they had been stored for the off season were stuffed with summer clothes, and the duffels of winter gear that we had ordered online in Majuro were put at ready use in each person's clothing locker. There were moments when I wasn't sure where it was all going to go, and it was with a great feeling of relief that I realized that I had reached the end of that job!

It has been weighing on my mind for some time that all this winter gear was going to come downstairs wet and dripping while we are on passage, so we put some time into figuring out how we are going to hang and dry our foulies once we hit the cold weather. Victoria rigged quite a spider's web of lines in the aft head so that we could hang jackets and pants, we hung hanging lines from our louvers in the doors for socks, and we even ran a dead-end coil of heater hose (used for bleeding our system and tall enough to reach from the bathroom floor out the window to the upper deck) around our towel rack to increase the warmth in the aft head. Johnathan lashed a long piece of wood to the legs of our saloon table from which we will hang our damp boots (you can picture a Christmas mantel hung with stockings, only lower down under the table).

Johnathan loves to tinker with tools and bits of wood, often making modifications to items he has crafted in the past. When he wasn't tasked with a boat job, he could be found at his temporary workshop bench: generally this meant a corner of the saloon table, but when that was taken over by sewing, it meant the three middle companionway stairs (kind of a narrow vertical workspace). Anyone going up or down has learned long ago to watch out for plates or Lego, thanks to Benjamin, but now we needed to watch out for files, drills, and knives as well. I admire Johnathan's ability to carve a workspace out of nowhere, and to concentrate on his projects in the midst of many other jobs going on around him!

Johnathan at work

With all these changes big and small on board, I must admit that my favourite is one of the simplest: after seven years of trying not to get clobbered by our toilet seat, especially on starboard tack or rolly seas, we finally have a way to hold it in the upright position on any tack :) We secured a short piece of bungie cord to the wall behind the toilet, Victoria added a little pull-cord handle to it, and when the lid needs to be held upright, we just slip it behind the bungie and it stays put. Benjamin is probably the most grateful, as a falling lid comes at just the right point to catch him on the head, but all of us have exclaimed at both the simplicity and the effectiveness of our solution :)

Cruising may be 'maintenance in exotic locations' but thankfully our stopover was not all maintenance. During our first few days at Rongerik, the winds that would have made progress to windward unpleasant in Fluenta were perfect for kiting. Everyone had a go, and I was happy that our skills had not become too rusty during our work period in Majuro. Given the remoteness of our location, we were pretty conservative in our activities, kiting one at a time, and keeping the rescue dinghy at the ready. I got to try out my new Slingshot kite (shout of thanks to fellow cruiser, Philip, for arranging the order when we were off-grid in Ailuk and my old DNA blew up its internal bladder). As with any new equipment, it has brought the challenge of a learning curve, but I was grateful to see its turquoise and purple (angel?) wings flying above me in the clear blue sky. Max got his exercise kiting a mile upwind to play on the waves coming over the outer reef, and then had an enjoyable downwind run back to the beach; after that, he stayed closer to the beach working on jumps and turns. Both kids launched and got on their feet almost right away, and were able to control their kite enough to kite into the deeper water and back to the shallow sandbar where one of us was waiting to catch them and help them walk upwind to the beach to go again; on the days that I hadn't quite got the hang of my new kite, I got my fitness through the aquacize aspect of walking upwind in thigh-deep water with a kid and a kite in tow, only to do it all again a few minutes later.

The island where we were kiting is home to a seabird rookery (we counted at least four kinds of birds). They were curious, but not bothered, by us, and would fly overhead at about two feet above us, then hover to give us a better look, as if to say 'what kind of creature are you?'. The first time we came ashore, we had a flock of dozens hover above the dinghy just to look at us, but after a few days, they didn't pay much attention at all. They were quite taken by the pulpit on Fluenta, and there were generally two, and as many as four, boobies hanging out on our bow. We didn't mind them there, where they could poop overboard, but we chased them away from our boom, and willed them away from the top of the mast, where they could do real damage. They were quite fascinated by our wind generator, but thankfully kept their distance from it. Later in the week, Johnathan was able to take the 'big camera' ashore for some wildlife shots - there were numerous fluffy white boobie chicks in their nests, or on the ground trying out the wings. The chicks were surprisingly big: they seemed almost full-sized, identifiable as chicks only by their striking white fluffy feathers.

So many birds and they are so fearless.

This booby chick was quite unconcerned about Johnathan's presence.

Unfortunately, as with everywhere else in the Pacific, the beaches are littered with the rubbish that drifts down from the first world.   See more at this post

Benjamin watching the boobie chick

Johnathan got this nice photo of a boobie on her nest.

and of course the boobies need to come out and visit Fluenta.

We went to this small island on the full moon and saw fresh turtle tracks from the laying mums.

All this working hard and playing hard meant lots of hungry tummies. We ate our way through the excess in our freezer, making room for any fish we might catch at sea, and eating up any tasty food that might get confiscated at the US border. On the menu: roast chicken, fried fish, pepper steak, and curried chicken :) We finally used a can of pumpkin we were given when our friends on EXODUS moved home in 2016 - it made a tasty addition to our Chicken Soup. Victoria and Benjamin took advantage of the calm to bake us a chocolate cake (which allowed us to use up a couple of tubs of icing from the fridge). When we were in Mexico, I used to quiz Victoria on fractions as we baked, and now she does the same thing with Benjamin. Another gift from EXODUS was their Rummykub set; it has become popular for games night, and Johnathan made sure that we cleared the table of maintenance debris in order to play several times during our stopover. It is especially fun because being a grownup does not seem to bring us an advantage; in fact, when we tallied the end-of-season scores for our Marshall Islands season, the kids had won twice as often as the grownups!

A couple of years ago some fellow cruisers (SV SWIFTSURE) set up the "Rongerik Yacht Club" with a lifetime membership to those who stopped by this Atoll and placed a memento at the 'Club'. We planned a bonfire to explore the yacht club island, and were happy to be joined by another yacht who had anchored nearby the day before. I found it interesting to note that even though this island was only a few hundred yards away from the kiting island, instead of being home to nesting birds and crabs, it was inhabited by ants and rats. I imagine that there is a correlation there! Despite these four- and six-legged companions, we had a fabulous evening under a full moon, and added our hanging buoy to the collection left by other members, many of whom we had come to know during our two seasons in the Marshalls. When Johnathan found out that the skipper of the other boat was also knowledgeable about one of his favourite subjects he absolutely lit up, and the two of them had quite an animated conversation throughout the evening; this is the kind of adult-child connection that I have loved to watch develop through our years of cruising, where learning can happen across generations. We had an especially small-world moment the next day when he came aboard to look at our Predictwind weather data and we got talking about previous passages he had made. It turns out that he had been aboard our very boat 20 years ago when he buddy-boated with a boat called Blue-Jay. We still have the little Blue Jays on our bow to mark that era in our boat's life.

Placing our mark at the Rongerik Yacht Club

Looking at the weather for the passage north.  Vagrant buddy-boated with Fluenta, then Blue Jay, twenty years ago !

Max had expected to spend the better part of a day free-diving to clean the hull before we departed. He was pleasantly surprised to be joined by both big kids, and the three of them spent about three hours inspecting and cleaning the bottom. They found grass and little coral formations, but thankfully no barnacles. The little hard formations had to be individually scraped away to leave the maximum bottom paint and the minimum of life forms.

Finally, with everything on our "Rongerik List" checked off, the time came to leave. Like a big flywheel spinning back into motion, it took several days of concerted effort to get everything dried, shipshape, stowed, and ready. We almost left on Wednesday afternoon, but late on Tuesday we decided that a morning departure on Thursday would be better. This gave time for Max to go up the mast to inspect the rig and lubricate our new (and tight) mast track without the pressure of trying to get out the pass in the morning light on the same day. It also gave us time to fit in a snorkelling expedition, something we had almost scratched off our list for lack of time, and we were so glad we did! On one coral head, we saw more sea life than we had seen almost all season: three rather curious grey sharks, a big old sea turtle who came right up to Max, a small turtle who swam by without interest, several giant clams, including one half the size of our kids, and quite a number of large fish. There is ciguaterra in this lagoon, so the fish are entirely undisturbed by fishing, which means that they can grow through a natural life span, and were quite big. Before snorkelling, we took a picnic lunch to the next island along, where we took a walk around the island and Johnathan and an adolescent boobie communed with one another for quite some time; the bird was in the bushes at the edge of the beach, and Johnathan was able to quietly come within a few feet, while they just looked at one another without moving. This is a very special place, and we were blessed to be able to visit.

Last tropical "selfie"

This old sea turtle swam right up to me and appeared to be looking me in the eye.

A grey shark heading over to check out the kids

Johnathan impressively taking an underwater selfie of himself blowing a bubble ring

Rongerik is full of massive giant clams.  Hard to tell in the photo but this one is about three feet long.

On the morning of our departure, we had towels blowing on the foredeck trying to make them as dry as possible before we left. Suddenly the heavens opened and a massive squall passed overhead dumping rain on us. Thankfully, we got the towels into the cockpit before they were totally drenched. When I went out a few minutes later to peg them in the newly-returned sunshine, I was heartened to see an entire rainbow centered over Fluenta's stern. In my tradition, this is a very good omen, and I decided to take it at face value as a blessing on our voyage.

Departure rainbow

To prepare for departure, we performed an evolution that we have never done before: we brought up our main big Rocna anchor, and then anchored again with our spare light weight aluminum Fortress anchor, in order to give ourselves time and stability to bring the Rocna on deck and then stow it below. I felt quite daunted by this prospect, envisioning a bashed hull or jammed fingers, but it all went very smoothly. We secured a spinnaker halyard to the roll bar of the anchor while it was in its usual position on the bow roller, then I eased out quite a bit of chain while Max controlled the anchor's position, and Johnathan controlled the spinnaker halyard. We brought the anchor around to the side of the boat and then hoisted it aboard (no jammed fingers, and no smashed fiberglass!). Once the anchor was on the deck, we detached the chain and carried it downstairs to a waiting piece of plywood on the floor of the V-berth. Max had drilled four tiny holes around the perimeter of the space, and inserted amsteel loops with stopper knots on the bottom to act as eye straps. He used these amsteel loops to tie the anchor in place with line. We have heard horror stories of anchors being knocked loose at sea and damaging the bow of fiberglass sailboats, so it seemed like a wise thing to do and the reduced weight on the bow will help our windward performance. It also meant that we could drop our chain down below the deck and tape the opening closed (with just the retaining string on the end of the chain sticking out so we can pull it up when we need to). This arrangement also frees our anchor chain up if we need to deploy our sea anchor. It was nice to finish this move with a feeling that 'that wasn't so bad after all'! Once the Rocna was stowed below, Max and Johnathan used the capstan on our windlass to bring in the Fortress, which we secured on the stern, and then we were off!

Stowing the anchor for passage.

Both Victoria and Johnathan took a turn on the bow on bombie watch as we sailed across the lagoon, while I was downstairs stowing the last of the loose items from counters and tables. This gave them a great vantage point to watch the dolphins who came to play with our bow wave as we sailed along. There were several of them, and they seemed quite delighted by our presence. What a blessing to have such beautiful creatures come to see us off :)

We exited the pass in the early afternoon, and hoisted our staysail and a reefed main, which were a good combination for the first 18 hours or so. We rollicked along in about 15-18 kts of wind, first in the lee of the lagoon, and then in the ocean swell. It was a good reminder of what close reaching at sea can feel like! Thankfully, these conditions were short-lived, and by the next morning, we were able to stow the staysail and continue to close reach with a somewhat furled genoa and reefed main.

The last two days have been carbon copies of each other - blue skies, slight seas, and comfortable winds. These are the conditions that sailors dream about! Fluenta seems to like this point of sail at 45 degrees to the apparent wind, and ever since we pulled out the genoa, we have had a boat speed around 7 kts. We have our autopilot set on wind-hold, and we will follow the wind until we sail north out of the trade winds. Sometimes we have been making our course for Dutch Harbor, but more often than not we are heading slightly northwest. This is as we expected.

Victoria spent much of today knitting a pair of mittens for Johnathan, but she put that project down this afternoon when the seam holding one of our rain enclosure panels to the bimini began to tear. She spent the next couple of hours with the speedy stitcher, closing the gap, and stitching much of the panel aft of where it tore. It looks like the thread (which was just re-sewn in NZ last year) had become sunburnt and weak. We will likely do the port side together tomorrow.

We spent a few minutes yesterday talking to Paul Karchut from CBC Calgary (tune into his weekend morning show on Sunday between 8:30 and 9:00 to hear us); we spoke a few weeks ago with Jerry West from CBC Halifax Information Morning. It is heartening and delightful to know that so many people are interested in and following our journey.

It is admittedly daunting to set out on a month-long voyage with three children across almost 3,000 nm; however, we are as prepared as we can be, and will take things one watch at a time until we get there. We left Rongerik with over 2,700 nm to go, and we have already had 'milestone chips' at suppertime tonight to celebrate that number dipping below 2,500; perhaps a more fun way to see things is that we will make our way to Alaska one bag of chips at a time :)

Thanks for your good wishes,

Love to all,
Elizabeth
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At 2019-06-10 10:11 PM (utc) SV Fluenta's position was 17°51.51'N 166°56.79'E

Heading back to sea

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