Sailing Highs & Lows

Sailing the Pacific Ocean had many highs and lows. When the weather is calm and a gentle breeze, its the best thing ever. Not so much the case when the winds pick up to more than 30 knots, and the seas become rough with steep breaking waves. The first couple of days we learned just how capable Blue Safari is and learned a lot of new noises. When you're 100 miles offshore at night, every new sound makes you wonder if something is breaking, loose, or coming apart. After 2-3 days of this, we all became pretty comfortable and felt extremely safe and amazed by the performance of the boat.

Once we got into come calmer seas, it was time to throw out some fishing lines. It didn't take long before we had a tuna on the hook!

Initially we were reeling it in on the rod, but ultimately we just grabbed the line by hand and pulled the tuna onto the deck. We were all actually so surprised and excited that we caught something, that we didn't get the best pictures, but we were guessing it was about a 20-25 lb big eye tuna.

Yes, this was the best picture we got of our catch

You can't get a good idea of the size, but these were 2 large tuna steaks. Fresh fish, almost of any kind, is really the best tasting food you can have! Eventually we made fresh sushi rolls, ceviche, and few steaks.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the sail was while we were flying our spinnaker, also called a "kite" for a good reason. With this sail we can almost sail the same speed as the wind, going almost directly down wind.

Unfortunately, as we were leaving Turtle Bay, the kite got caught on a batten on the mail sail and ripped the edge of the sail from top to bottom. We were all pretty bummed as we then had to take the sail down and sail a different course than what we really wanted, as without this sail, a catamaran can't really sail directly down wind.

Fortunately, we were prepared for this sort of event. Once we were on our new course of sail, Lisa and Shelley started setting up our Sailrite sewing machine to start the repairs. The inside of the boat was now a sail repair loft. Ultimately, we got it repaired enough to use once again, so we were able to use it on the next leg of the Haha.

One of the many delights of sailing is the view of sunsets, and sunrises. We have joked that we have seen more sunrises in the last month than we have the entire rest of our lives. The colors just cant be captured by the camera equipment we have, but the colors are really vibrant. Also, the stars at night are so bright, you can't help but just continually look up overhead. We've all been on the camping trip, or somewhere in the middle of nowhere away from the city where you see all the starts. Being 150 miles offshore in the ocean far away from city lights, the stars appear even 10x more bright than the best remote trip we've ever been on land.