TranspacBlogII-23: Daily Life on Psyche.

I haven't written much about everyday life on Psyche. Ok.

Take today, for example. Steve Calhoun is off watch and is just now up on deck taking a bath. This is a pretty exciting affair. Not Steve, the bath. You go up on deck with a bucket and a bottle of camp suds and Prell (I just take camp suds), half, or completely, naked, depending on your level of insecurity. Ok, just so you know, Steve wears speedos, Bill and Andrew wear swim trunks, Charlie wears boxer shorts, and Jim goes stark raving naked. This matters, of course, because the on-watch pair are avidly watching the spinnaker and mainsail and sailing direction.

But actually, the bath is quite a treat. First, just the act of standing on the foredeck of a bucking seahorse which is catching waves and going 11 knots and jumping back and forth and making a huge racket, is really amazing. When the wind is high (hasn't done that yet), it is quite a trick to keep standing. So much so, that sometimes you have to just sit down. So first, you take a bucket with a strong rope, tied to your hand, and fetch some water. First time you ever try this, the force of the ocean rushing past either pulls the bucket out of your hand, or knocks you down or both. But we are all pretty used to it, and brace properly. Then you pour the bucket over your head. This feels REALLY good. Cool tropical water. Then you get the camp suds and cover yourself. I still haven't learned that you should fetch another bucket of water BEFORE the camp suds. Instead, eyes closed, I grope around for the edge of the boat and throw the bucket in.

This reminds me of one time on Bokonon, my brother's 32 foot wooden sloop. We were just leaving from the outer Antilles to head for Panama. Big following sea, but virtually calm wind. I lost the fucking bucket. I looked at Howard. You cannot survive without a bucket on a boat. You use it for EVERYTHING. "Should I dive for it?" He shrugged. I dove. My dad told me later I was a damn fool to do that, not the last time he would say that. I had to free dive about 15 feet in the crystal clear water to catch up with the sinking bucket. I remember two moments of panic in this adventure. The first was when I turned back toward the surface, while holding the bucket by its rope. It acted like a parachute. I wasn't going to make it up there before I lost my breath. I quickly grabbed the bucket itself, and turned it bottom up, and this enabled me to swim it to the surface. The second moment of panic was looking for Bokonon. At first I didn't know where to look. When I did see her, all I could see was half of the sail. The rest of the boat was hidden by the big swell. Luckily, Howard and I hadn't fought recently. He turned Bokonon back toward me and I climbed aboard with the bucket. Whew. I think I may have referred to this misadventure previously, but that is the whole sordid story. Why we didn't have an EXTRA bucket on board , like Steve does on Psyche, is completely beyond me.

Anyway, back to the bath. After a couple of suds, rinses, you are ready to rinse yourself with fresh water. Steve has one of those amazingly simple inventions called a solar shower. Nothing more than a plastic sac, clear on one side, and black on the other, full of freshly freshly made water. After a surprisingly short time of this sac sitting on the deck with its clear side up, the water is piping hot. Hoist the sack on the spinnaker pole and open its spigot on the bottom, and out pours really nice hot water for the final rinse. Do it completely, because we are making new water every day. What a luxury this is. On Bokonon, which took a month to go from the Canaries to Barbados, we each had a cup of fresh water for washing per day. Water was very scarce on long passages then. The advent of the water maker, makes those days obsolete.

At night we have 2 hour watches. 2 hours on 3 off. I come on and relieve Steve, and sail with Jim for 1 hour. Then he wakes up Andrew, who sails with me the next hour. Then I wake up Charlie and thereby get to go to bed. While I sleep for 3 hours, Charlie and Andrew sail an hour. Then Andrew wakes up Jim to sail with Charlie an hour, then Charlie wakes up Steve to sail with Jim an hour. Then Steve wakes me up, and we start all over again.

During the day it is the same algorithm, but double the time, i.e., 4 hours on, 6 off.

Thus, having 5 guys instead of 4 means you get much more sleep. Farfar has 4 guys. Don't know their watch system, but we get more sleep than they do.

This may pay off in the end, but so far, they are kicking our butts. Yesterday's role call put them ahead of us, but only a couple of miles south. We figured they must be heading north. We stayed on starboard tack with them, but the weather download seemed to significantly favor 60 miles south, so we jibed over around 2AM last night and headed south again.

Damned if they weren't 20-some miles south of us at this morning's role call. They totally faked us out (Charlie lost 20 bucks to Steve on this one; I lost a Mai Tai to Jim)! They made it look like they were coming north, and then suddenly headed the other direction with a vengeance. And still they are 12 miles closer to Hawaii than we are. How the hell are we going to catch these tricksters?

Part of our problem catching up with these guys, is that there has been an East-West wind gradient as well. This means that whoever is ahead has a little more wind than the next boat. But the weatherman says that the east-west gradient is getting weaker, so our chance may yet come.

But until then, I've got a bath to take.