Sailing Bear and Seal

We started day 16 with a hair less than 1,000 nm to go.

We enjoyed our postponed brunch with buttermilk pancakes. I look forward to picking up some bananas ashore next week to make my favorite banana pancakes, but none of our fruit lasted into the third week of sailing so we are down to packaged food. I’ve learned to appreciate UHT (ultra high temperature) pasturized milk. It is simpler when making yogurt, yay cold-start! My daily breakfast of either yogurt & jam or oatmeal was easily set aside for Mark’s pancakes.

He must have caught the cooking bug because he didn’t stop at pancakes. He pulled out from the recipe archives a milk-bread recipe he found when Nanook was in Turkey. It is more akin to Indian Naan than it is to a Greek pita, but delicious none-the-less. I whipped up some hummus, best recipe here. I added 1/2t of cumin.

Making anything on the boat is a labor of love because of the limited storage space. I would love to house a Vitamix, but I have to make due with a stick blender. These burn out within a couple years because of the abuse I give them.

This has been the only sailing vessel we’ve seen with our eyes (we’ve seen some on radar but not visible by sight). They called over the radio and wished us well. Being an 80′ monohull, they became visible, sailed by, and out of visibility within six hours. They are twice our length and easily 12-16 times our cost. This boat manufacturer hosts a world rally for their boats only. If I win a lottery of over $5 million, I might consider joining them. Until then, I’ll stick with the Pacific Posse and rely on comrades in the Coconut Milk run WhatsApp group.

The WhatsApp groups have been both fun and assistive. Most participants give a daily update of their conditions.

Navigation isn’t the only topic in the group. We cover everything from random musings about what schools of fish are, how your yogurt is setting up in coorelation to the current sea state, crowd-sourcing repair ideas and how to save pennies by putting your Starlink connection in jeapardy. As with all things internet, the best way to elicit the most responses isn’t to ask a question, but to instead give a wrong answer. It is amusing how easily a sailor can be entertained when out to sea for weeks.

In the video, Mark speaks about the goose barnacle issue. The faster the boat goes; the faster these buggers grow. The US Navy calculates an increase of 40% fuel usage on Naval ships when these pests take hold. They can live for up to 20 years. When transcontinental travel was limited to sailing, there was a profession that would dive on the ships in harbor to harvest this food source that is still seen as a delicacy. Goose barnacles can command up to $200/lbs, with the highest consuming countries being Canada, Portugal, and Spain. I have no desire to harvest the ones on Nanook and we are told through the WhatsApp group that without movement they fall off to find homes elsewhere leaving their “foot” or holding mechanism on the hull. After a few days, we will have to dive down on the hull with a soft paint scraper and scrap the feet off. What a mess.

By the end of Day 19, we have only 550 nautical miles (nm) left to landfall.