It is Friday, March 6 (only a week away from Friday, March 13) and a black bird has circled the boat at least three times, landing on the bimini once. The moon has had a halo around it for the past two nights. This afternoon we had a rainbow. There is a small patch of lightning crackling off the port side (downwind so it’s no cause for concern). What does it all mean? Are there strong winds coming or more heat? A storm or a calm? Thank goodness I didn’t live a hundred years ago. Like all the other sailors, I would have been a nervous wreck, just waiting for the next omen.
Since we have a service called PredictWind that allows us to download weather forecasts via our Iridium Go!, I am going to call them favorable signs. Joe has been using the GFS model (turns out there are various models from different forecast services around the world) which has been fairly accurate in this part of the world for us so far. It shows that the wind will increase tonight and be a steady 10-15 knots for the next few days.
Today brought all kinds of interesting developments. I woke up to unusually quiet engine sounds – the kind of sounds the engine might make if we were circling around to pick up someone in the water. I stuck my head out the hatch and, noticing the calm water, asked Marin, “Did Daddy go swimming?” This would be quite unusual for him – he’s not one to abandon ship in the middle of an ocean but my sleep-befuddled brain, viewing the glassy seas, thought it might be a possibility.
She said, “No – he’s just looking at the giant turtle again.” What?! I ran up and saw Joe peering over the side. He said, “There’s a big fishing net out here and there are tons of fish in it and a turtle swimming around.” He circled again so I could see it. I didn’t see any fish in the net and the turtle had left but I did see a couple of large-sized fish hovering in the vicinity of the net. It was a long, vertical tube kind of net that looked like it had been set there intentionally. There was a buoy with a name on it and the net was in good condition. Joe was careful not to get the net caught in our propellers as we left it and its unfortunate residents behind.
Around 10 am this morning, I noticed a large bank of dark clouds on the horizon. Normally the mornings are sticky and hot so I cheered when I saw clouds building.
But when they kept building, I decided to shut all the ports and hatches, take in the seat cushions and wake Joe from his morning nap to see if he wanted to put in a reef. He looked at the clouds and put in a reef.
The squall gave us enough time to do all our preparations and get some video footage for Cobin, who has been ceaselessly working on creating special effects videos with his new computer and software. He downloaded a bunch of videos through a site called SkillShare and has essentially been taking video-making classes via these downloads while we sail. He has been intrigued with the lightning effect lately so these black clouds seemed like a good backdrop for him to use.
The squall delivered – a delightful cool breeze came through, followed by some light rain. The preliminary gusts reached 20 knots and Joe decided to play it safe and put in a second reef. The wind quickly died to 15 knots but the rain increased, making me glad I had packed everything away. When life gives you rain on Charm, you get out the scrub brushes and clean.
The girls put on their rain coats and had a great time collecting rain water and wiping things down.
They wanted to put their water collection in our fresh water tanks but since they had primarily gathered it via squeegee or by wringing out cleaning cloths into bowls, I convinced them that we should just use it to rinse off the areas I was scrubbing.
Charm is delightfully clean and salt-free and stayed quite cool for most of the day. After the rain wrapped up, we still had several hours of clouds passing overhead so we avoided that intense sun burning down on us today.
We even got a rainbow with two little treasures at the end of it! For those that can’t see the photo, Marin and Tully are in hammocks at the end of the rainbow.
It’s Friday which means that it was pizza and a movie night. Marin got to pick tonight and she chose . . . Frozen! We invoked the “seen it too many times” rule and, with some minor grumbling, she changed to Tangled. We paused briefly for Joe to do the nightly SSB radio call with Danica.
Normally, the World ARC (WARC) fleet does SSB calls at 9 am and 5 pm every day. This allows all the boats to make contact and ask for help if needed or break up the monotony of the trip by hearing how other people are doing, what fish they’ve caught, what they think about the weather, etc. Danica, a boat in our fleet, left from Salvador straight to Grenada to have some engine work done so they are on their own and too far away to reach the other boats on the channel used for the daily WARC calls.
Glen asked if we would be willing to try reaching him on the Single Side Band (SSB) radio and Joe, always interested in testing our equipment, agreed. Each night at 9 pm, Joe and Glen methodically switch stations until they find one where they can hear each other clearly. This is the point of the SSB – to have long-range communications, so it’s nice to know it works. Danica is about 700 miles away from us and we can still communicate with them, which is fun for us and reassuring for them. If they have any issues, they know that they have someone that will be listening for them at 9 pm each night. Joe passes along the news of the fleet and, when we have our 9 am call tomorrow, we will pass along news of Danica.
There are a couple of late entrants into the ongoing micro battles on Charm. While I am close to declaring victory on the kitchen moths and small ants, I have discovered that the weevils I thought I had eliminated are not quite gone. I noticed them a while back while trying to eliminate the moths. There were a large quantity of dead ones in the cereal/snack bench. I cleaned it out entirely and threw away various flours and cereals. I didn’t see them again until one day when I saw one crawling on the table. I did a quick search and discovered a large quantity in an open bag of Cheerios. I threw them away and told Joe and the kids. Joe said, “That explains why every time I had a bowl of Cheerios, I found weevils on the table. I thought it was just a weird coincidence.” Hmmm – I’m not sure what to say about that. A few days later, I put out a fresh bag of Cheerios and Tully asked, “Are you sure these don’t have measles?” Measles – no. Weevils – who knows?
Tonight, I had the head lamp out to check on the pizzas. When I turned it on, I noticed a couple of large ants scurrying away from the fridge. That’s odd – the large ants are almost always outside. And they don’t scurry the same way. Auughh – they’re weevils, not ants. They seem to hate the light because I’ve noticed them scurry other times when I catch them where they shouldn’t be with the headlamp. The battle rages on . . .
I did make serious headway with the window coverings yesterday which almost counteracts the backtracking with the weevils. Since we got Charm, we have struggled with how to keep mosquitoes and intense sunlight out of the windows while letting air in. They make various devices to do this but they were either too expensive or didn’t seem like they would work on our boat.
We had custom window coverings made that snap onto our window frames. You can snap on the mosquito net and then snap on the light shade on top of it. This seems like a great idea and works fairly well, at least in terms of the light reduction. The mosquito screens don’t fit as tightly as they should but I tell myself that they at least reduce the mosquitoes that are able to come in – it must be better than just a wide-open window, right? And if we really wanted to prevent the mosquitoes from entering, we should probably do something about the wide-open door and salon windows with no screens. When it comes right down to it, it’s unlikely the screens do much but we continue to put them up whenever we’re in port.
Like anything else on the boat, they have to be maintained. Lately, I’ve discovered that a few of the snaps are binding, leading to one getting ripped out of the fabric due to some overzealous yanking by a frustrated, sweaty, mosquito-bitten me. Since I spend a great deal of time snapping and unsnapping the window coverings to delicately balance the air, bugs and light wafting over our children, I decided to clean them.
I started with the four hatches but decided that if I was really going to do a good job, I should do all the window coverings. I was just using a Q-tip to put some olive oil on to prevent rust but then I encountered some growth that was binding the snaps so I decided to clean them with vinegar. Quite quickly, my small project ballooned into cleaning every single snap connection on all the window coverings with vinegar and then following up with a swabbing of olive oil. With 16 windows, two sets of covers (one net and one shade) and at least four snaps per side, to include the side on the windows, this turned into an all-day project.
It’s quite amazing to me the things I do on the boat that I would never do at home. I can’t imagine spending hours cleaning and oiling snaps on window coverings as I have done on Charm. But my comfort in a house is not tied quite so directly to the physical state of things in the way it is on Charm. We’re probably closer to life in a tent or an RV than life in a house. If you get a little pile of sand in a house, chances are that it won’t make it into your bed. But on Charm, the sand on your feet will definitely get into your bed, as will the sand blowing through the air and the moths (did I mention the moths in Namibia that found their way into everything?) that just happen to live in the anchorage you’re in. Oh – and if you anchor near a volcano, you will be cleaning ash off of every surface every day that you’re there.
Before I ruin all your romantic notions of life on a boat with the tedium of daily struggles, here’s why cleaning snaps and vacuuming up moth carcasses and hunting down weevils, while tiresome at times, is worthwhile, at least to me. In the rare moments between tasks, when the wind and the waves are just right, I get that blissful feeling of being an intimate part of the world in which we live. There’s a weird sort of joy in the struggle to exist and triumph over your surroundings and it’s hard to get that in the comfort of “normal” life.
This evening, I have that blissful feeling and that weird sort of joy. Perhaps that’s what the circling bird and the moon halos foretold? Who knows. I’ll just enjoy it while it lasts.
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