Toau to Hilo: Day 10 -- Why Not?

What a BEAUTIFUL crossing, we're so glad you came with us!

The seas were gentle and kind for the first time in weeks; the winds were perfect. The moon was in a glorious and festive mood, and she stayed up late for our little party; the sky was clear...

Orion was there, he's been chillin' off our Starboard quarter these days. The familiar constellation lies low in the sky and perfectly horizontal around here, so we like to think of him, like a giant teenager, stretched out on his side, propped up on his elbow, just hangin' out with us all night.

We have a bet going about who will spot our familiar old friend, Polaris, first, as we say a fond farewell to that Southern Cross, we were so lucky to get to know on our small journey, here below the fabled line.
It's been a rockin', mind-blowing, few months and much has changed in the hearts and minds of this crew of four since we first became Shellbacks six months ago. Hard to believe really, everything we saw and experienced, in such a short period of time. With full hearts, we had much to be grateful for last night as we banged our pots and sang to the sea and set adrift a rainbow of names and prayers.

Hunter and I baked a chocolate, "volcano cake" in honor of our Pacific Rim experience and our upcoming adventure to the big island of Hawaii where we will get to visit Volcano national park!
The kids opened their long-coveted bottle of Orangina, (reserved for just this occasion) and Jon and I poured a grog (on hand for many occasions) and we toasted our hail and hearty crew and honored great King Neptune with a splash and a dash and a serving of cake.

He must have liked the offerings because today was the fairest of all, so far. The current set in our favor and the winds were perfect and clocked around to put us on a beam reach--Pura Vida's favorite and fastest point of sail and we hauled along, doing 7 knots in 15 knots of wind.
Bliss.

We took the opportunity to rest and relax and lay in the sun, dawdling and day dreaming as the boat did all the work. Cooing thanks and praise to our trusty vessel, we patted her blistered and peeling brightwork (hard to believe, once I was so varnish-proud, actually named my blog, THE WET EDGE...TWELVE PEELING COATS is more like it these days). We promised to spoil her with long-needed attentions when we are laid up in Honolulu in a few months.

Our languid day wasn't entirely without purpose, though...
We were taking this day of intentional rest, due to the chance of more unsettled weather in our near future.

The ITCZ, which has been virtually non-existent for the past week has uncoiled its serpentine line over our upcoming Longitude. Not only that, but the weather fax shows a trough moving West, converging over our position, while the wind gribs show things becoming very squirrelly and backwards due to this low pressure system.

Screen capture of wind patterns from PassageWeather.com. I've put their icon here to represent their approximate current position, but don't forget you can also see their current position under the "Where Are We?" tab, above. At Passage Weather, though, you can view wind, current, and other predictions, as well as current conditions.

Jon spends hours, everyday, pouring over our weather info and studying our course.

Any low pressure event, like a trough, will suck all the nice, steady winds, that we sailors look for, towards it. It creates a lot of confused, useless stuff, for hundreds of miles around it and generates moderate to severely yucky thunderstorms and squally conditions... and who needs that out here in the middle of nowhere, with 1500 miles still to go?

One thought was to move behind the bugger and miss out on all the chaos it would cause.

The problem with this is, looking at the gribs (and these can always be wrong, its weather after all and it often just does what it damn well pleases; not what some computer generated model says it should), we would have to backtrack like 500 miles to get behind it and once we do, it could hang around for ten days or so--by which time, we would not have very much food or propane left to make it the rest of the way to Hawaii...
Hmmmm....

Next idea?

Try to out run the sucker.

Well, we aren't exactly fast, so this would be bad idea if it was a storm but at the moment it doesn't look like that and if we adjust our course slightly to the North West, we might just beat it to our mark (the one where we want to turn West and head for Hilo) and get out ahead of it, where it won't affect those Northeast trades we're looking for.

Given our current wind and direction, this looks like the best option, so we shook out our reefs and picked up the pace. (Being a cruising boat, we like to keep it easy on our rig, so we take things nice and gentle, under shortened sail most of the time.)

If we can't outrun it, we might get popped and have to slog it out through whatever comes but at this point, we kind of have no choice.

The other thing that could happen (oh please, oh please. let this be what happens), is it could beat us there by a lot and have actually passed and dragged all its yucky business with it.

All the models we look at have this entire business a few days North of us, so this whole conundrum, involves much math and plotting, with wind and boat speeds and predicted and non predicted drift and the possibility that the gribs will be totally wrong and we will get something all together different than we expect.

Welcome to the carnival, fun-house ride of visiting the infamous, ITCZ!

For now, though, all is wonderful and glorious and as idyllic a day sailing in the South Pacific as one could dream up.

One thing we have certainly learned since setting out on this journey in the first place...
Is not to stress about it too much.

Sure, we keep an eye on the weather but at a certain point, if you're going to sail an ocean...
you're going to just have to deal with whatever comes up and worrying about something you can't control isn't going to change it.

Do your diligence, be prepared, and then... enjoy the day you have in front of you.

One of my favorite things about Valentine was that, even though her English is pretty great, somewhere along the line, she adopted this "Italian mama" thing... where she says things like "Mama Mia!" but when Gaston was heading out to do something that was crazy difficult or someone made a suggestion to her that might not be her ideal of what she wanted to do, she would just shrug her big, beautiful, chubby, shoulders and say in the most relaxed way possible,
"Why not?"
Like this released her from having any anxiety about the future, whatsoever.

I loved that.

So, when Jon says, 'OK, baby, lets shake out those reefs and we'll head this sucker off at the pass..."
I just take a breath, let it go, and say, C

"Why not?".