Twenty-Nine Days at Sea

My husband, Roy, lifts the engine hatch for the third time since sunrise. I say nothing. The float plan is sent, the watch schedule is taped to the salon wall, and ahead of us lie 4,000 nautical miles of the largest ocean on Earth. There is nothing left to check. There is only leaving.

Crossing the Pacific has been the point of this life since the day we first dreamed it up. We’ve spent two years earning the right to try, working our way up and down the U.S. East Coast and through the Caribbean, learning the boat’s moods and our own. Our route is the one cruisers call the Coconut Milk Run: through the Panama Canal in December, then west on the trade winds in late March, timed to cross before the next cyclone season.

The crossing comes in two pieces. First, 900 nautical miles to the Galápagos. Then the long one: 3,100 nautical miles of open water to the Marquesas.

The Hitchhikers

Our first stowaway is a small bird that drops onto the rail as Panama slides astern. He rides with us for a while, then lifts off and is gone.

The red-footed boobies are another matter. Two arrive, then several, and they settle in as if they’ve bought tickets. It’s a marvel to see birds this far from land. It’s less of a marvel to clean up after them.

We string a barrier of zip ties along their favorite perch.

The birds take it as a challenge. We add more zip ties.

Then we bring out white flags and spread trash bags across the deck to catch what the flags can’t stop. Eventually, we surrender. Months from now, aboard a friend’s boat on the other side of the ocean, we’ll spot the exact same zip-tie defense and laugh until we can’t breathe.

By day three, the boat has found its rhythm, and so have we. Roy, my brother-in-law Steve, and I share the watches, four hours on and eight off, and we all take the nights. Someone is always at the helm, eyes moving between the horizon and the radar, while the FLIR camera turns the black water into shades of gray. Captain Roy walks the deck hunting for chafe, with one last round an hour before sunset. I run the galley and wash and shred every scrap of plastic by hand, because out here, there is no such thing as throwing something away. The boobies aren’t our only stowaways, either. Most mornings, a squid or two lies on deck, flung aboard in the dark.

Neptune’s Line

Then the wind quits. We’ve reached the doldrums, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the trade winds of two hemispheres meet and cancel each other out. An hour of glassy calm gives way to a squall that pours itself out and moves on, leaving the calm behind it. Counter-currents tug at our speed. We’ve carried extra diesel for exactly this, so we start the engines and motor on.

The calm turns out to be a gift. We’re nearing the equator, and none of us has ever crossed it. In sailors’ terms, we are “polliwogs,” and polliwogs must answer to King Neptune, a tradition that goes back centuries.

We skip the costumes. Instead, Steve makes Neptune’s face on a cabbage, and we hand the sea god a trident and his own bottle of rum.

Then we gather around the chart plotter and watch the numbers fall.

We circle back across the line for the ceremony, then once more for the dunking. The sea is flat enough to swim in, so we clip our tethers to the boat, leave someone aboard, and float in the Pacific at zero degrees latitude.

We climb out as shellbacks.

Eight days after leaving Panama, we drop anchor off Santa Cruz Island. We spend fifteen days in the Galápagos, where we sort trash into blue, green, and black, and our fourth crew member, David, joins us. Leaving is harder than I expected.

The Long Jump

This is the passage everyone talks about. For three weeks, there will be no land, no shelter, and no help within reach. We’d hoped to sail with a buddy boat, but the timing didn’t work out. We go alone.

Almost alone. A few days out, another catamaran appears a few miles off our beam, heading the same way. In a few months, on a dock in Papeete, we’ll finally meet her crew and become friends.

Now with four aboard, the watches stretch to three hours on and nine off, a luxury that feels almost indecent.

Everyone promised this would be the best passage of our lives, calm and impossibly beautiful. They’re half right. The seas build and ease, the boat rolls more than I’d like, and squalls march through. We’ve seen far worse, so we keep sailing.

And things break, because on a long passage, things always break. The asymmetrical spinnaker goes first, shredding into ribbons.

We can replace sails, so we let it go. Then the watermaker dies, and we switch to the backup we packed for exactly this moment. A solar fuse blows. Then the lazy jacks break, and every time we lower the mainsail, it spills across the boom like a loose bedsheet. Threading a single line back through the rigging takes all morning. Out here, a small fix feels like a summit.

But between the breakages, there is everything else. Flying fish skitter away from the hulls. Sunsets stretch on and on. Jupiter burns over the bow, and with no light on the horizon for a thousand miles, the stars crowd all the way down to the water. At night, the moon lays a silver road across the sea. Each morning, the sun answers in gold.

The days begin to blur. Watch, sleep, cook, watch. The ocean is the whole world, and land starts to feel like a rumor.

Landfall

For the second time on this voyage, we watch the numbers fall: the remaining miles on the plotter drop from a thousand to a hundred, then to ten.

On the twenty-first day, Roy spots it first, from the helm. Through the haze, the shapes on the horizon don’t look the way I’d imagined. They aren’t towering peaks. They’re geometric, flat planes and hard edges, as if someone has set blocks along the edge of the sea.

Up close, there’s no reef and no lagoon, nothing between the land and the open ocean. We anchor for the night off uninhabited Mohotani. We haven’t cleared in yet, so we can’t go ashore. We sit in the cockpit and look.

The next morning, we clear in at the gendarmerie on Hiva Oa. After 29 days at sea and 4,000 nautical miles, we have crossed the Pacific.

I had expected the emptiness to frighten me: thousands of miles from land, from other people, from help. Instead, it feels like peace. We tidy the lines and zip the sail bag shut, and I feel a pang that it’s over.

Then I look up at the island. French Polynesia is waiting.

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