TranspacBlogII-14; Adrift.

Have you imagined yourself a sole survivor of a ship wreck in a small vessel with no power, drifting alone in the Pacific?

Do it now.

That's the Psyche most of last night and this morning. Calculating how many years until we would arrive in Honolulu at our various very low speeds. The best one was this morning. We had "goose eggs" on our knot-meter, but the Global Positioning System computer told us what our real progress was: East-southeast. We were heading for a rendezvous with land half-way down the Baja Peninsula.

Well, Billy, you KNEW you were headed for trouble. You could have said, no way, not this year. But somehow our sense of fate forces us to go anyway. Kind of like the way Charlie Brown always lets Lucy hold the ball for him to kick it. He hopes that she will let him kick it, even though he knows that she will pull the ball away, and he will miss it, falling flat on his back.

Well, here we are kicking that damn ball. The last blog ended last evening, when we had finished a romp to Catalina, a dos-y-do of passing and repassing with our rival, Far Far, and a basically cheery blog about the sea.

Today's blog has very little of that. In fact, the wind died RIGHT after I finished that cheery blog, and my superstitious ways dictate that the next few blogs are not so cheery.

Night fell, and so did the wind. Teasing us with 6 knot gusts, and then dropping to nil. Our first goose eggs on the knot-meter occurred about midnight. This is the second most discouraging event, consequent to the wind dropping. The first most discouraging, yet to occur this year, is the "360", which refers to what happens to a sailboat when the wind is SO absolutely zero that the boat is no longer moving forward.

At all.

But life could be worse. We are presently sipping wine and watching the sun go down with Far Far on the horizon.

It starts when someone on the crew shouts out, "where are you going, Mr. Helmsman?"

The embarrassed helmsman just blushes and shows how pushing the tiller this way or that has NO effect on the direction the boat is facing.

Back in 1979, I sailed aboard Sumatra, an old Lapworth 50 owned by Al Martin, a lovely soul with a sense of adventure. Doug Jorgensen was our navigator that year. He was at the dock yesterday wishing us well. He reminded me that it was his blunder (he sailed into the infamous Pacific High, more later)that led to us doing a long series of several 360's in the absolute MIDDLE of the course (a 360 takes anywhere from 15 min to an hour). We actually made the best of that by jumping into the crystal clear water and taking a very refreshing swim. I'm looking forward to doing that again this year (NOT).

So the weather and it's uncertain future has put us in a superstitious mood. I won't tell you what the wind is like right now, for fear of tempting fate. The crew would kill me. So don't ask.