Saltbreaker

Alex and I are just getting ready to dinghy to shore when we see a powerboat approaching. Four guys are packed in the small yellow craft which is followed closely by an outrigger canoe with an outboard engine strapped to the back. We’re anchored outside the 200 person town of Hapatoni on the island of Tahuata in the Marquesan island chain of French Polynesia. The men are local Marqueseans and when they see us, one of them raises a plastic wrapped package into the air…

We arrive outside of Fatu Hiva, the eastern-most island of Polynesia in the early morning of our twenty-third day at sea. It is still dark out when I wake up for my shift, but you can just make out the outline of the island in the black sky. I keep smiling at it and kind of bounce all over the boat with energy, making dolphin sounds back at a group of dolphins that was giving us an early morning welcome call “Eee Eee Eee!” (Come…

Each day of the crossing we sent out a location update along with a brief daily update. Heres the full set of updates: April 17th, 2012: 0 45’S 90 18’W Arrived in Galapagos on Saturday. Equator crossing was a success, pulled up alongside it and dove across. Drank champagne, ate bread shaped like King Neptune, lit off some fireworks (and got reasonably lit ourselves). Galapagos has been a bit of a whirlwind. Managed to see a few enormous turtles, but the majority of our time…

A spot location! A small bit of excitement comes over me as I find time to check my personal email during an otherwise mundane yet stressful work day. I enter their coordinates. Yes Google Maps, I do want this location, and no I am not searching for pizza nearby even your algorithm can’t conceive this. I scroll out, and out, and out. The map scales from 2000 ft, to 1 mi, to 2mi, and on and on. 500 mi scale, nearing the capacity of the…

There’s something we have to tell you. All this time you’ve thought there were just the three of us aboard Saltbreaker, but the truth is: there’s a fourth. I think its about time you meet Helmer our auto-helm (or auto-pilot). Before this trip we hardly knew Helmer, and weren’t even sure we’d need him along with us. “Pirates didn’t have autopilots”. But it wasn’t long into the trip before Helmer became our new best friend. Right from the beginning Helmer set out to make it…

The sun had just risen and was struggling to force its way through the patchwork of fair-weather cumulus that had been following us through the convergence zone. Ahead of us one cloud looked out of place. It was darker than the rest and lower on the horizon. Then it hit me. “Land HO!”, Everyone was a sleep, so I had to whisper it, which felt about as ineffective as whispering an exclamation like “DUCK!”. After five days at sea there’s a strange elation that comes…

After our first provisioning run, we returned to the boat, dug deep into lockers we never touch, and pulled every scrap of food we own outside into the cockpit. Each item was added it to an inventory list, grouped with similar items and densely repacked. Tearing everything out of the boat like that is a lot of work, but can also be fun; a lot like reaching into a winter jacket in the fall and finding a $20 bill from the previous spring. Among our…

After a calm 6 hour sail from Tambor which included a textbook spinnaker run, we found ourselves at Isla Tortuga. After about another hour of nervously watching the depth finder we were able to firmly anchor off of Alcatraz, a smaller island adjacent to Isla Tortuga. Isla Tortuga is an odd place. The island is clearly a tropical paradise, but one of the beaches is set up as a commercial resort that tourists boat in and out of each day from nearby towns. The gift…

After the eventful first evening we all woke up refreshed early on the first morning. After a quick breakfast and thorough bailing of water out of the dinghy we set off for shore. Tamarindo is a small surf town that consists mostly of surf shops and people trying to sell you drugs. Our first order of business was to rent surfboards and see who would end up in the hospital first. Alex and Nick, born and raised in the Midwest, were surprisingly capable surfers, so…