Goodbye, for now!

The fellas made it home around 5:30 AM this morning. Their stats on the trip to Channel Islands, CA from Hanalei Bay, Kaua'i:

Nautical miles covered: 3,957

Total transit time: 33 days, 19 hours and 30 minutes

Dry pieces of clothing, pillows, blankets and bedding left aboard: 0

Items containing mold and/or moldy smell: Every damn one of them

So, this is the end of this chapter. We hope one day to continue this blog during another grand adventure as we sail off into nothingness towards another far off island.

Thanks to everybody who took an interest in our journey. Your support and well-wishing means the world.

Thoughts near the end...

The guys are now 140 nautical miles away. They'll either show up late tonight, or very early in the morning. I'm glad that their last 500 miles or so have had excellent wind, and Shenanigans is scooting right along.

Lately, I've been finding myself daydreaming pretty often about being out in the middle of nowhere, sailing peacefully along, just Jonny and I. I tell you, cruising is an addiction. It gets in your head and will always be there. I regret not taking the long trip home with the guys. At the time, I wanted to wash my hands of the situation forever. Yet, these past thirty-something days, I've had time to think about what happened.

I shouldn't let a couple bad experiences ruin an amazing way to see the world. Sure, sailing long distance can be gut-wrenchingly scary at times, or dreadfully monotonous at others. But, just like that old saying, "nothing easily obtained is worth fighting for," it is that journey that makes the payoff so great. When you walk on land for the first time in weeks, realizing that it was you, your partner(s), and vessel alone that got you there...that is a feeling beyond words. Additionally, I cannot even begin to describe the comraderie and goodwill of all the people we were so lucky to meet on our trip. That in itself is worth the seemingly endless days at sea.

I still want to see Mexico and the South Pacific by boat. Of course, that is easy for me to say...I'm not the one who just spent 34 days on the ocean, longing for home and trying to stay positive. We will have to see what the future holds for Shenanigans, Jon and I. For now, I think we will return to our role as "productive" members of society. I know Jon will suffer from my affliction as well: memories of an albatross eyeing us as it lazily glides by on the same puff of air that we ride, the sunshine illuminating monstrous towering cumulus, thousands of miles of open ocean surrounding us, warm rain, freedom.

I'm off to daydream a bit more.

Sail Mail I got from Jonathan Today

Yea I really have to fight hard to figure out what day of the week it is. Not that it matters to much. I still enjoying the sailing aspect of the trip I wouldn't mind to keep sailing around the world. Some days we have great wind and get to sail under the stars/moon light. That's got to be my favorite part. We are all working hard at keeping our hopes up, we all realize there is no good in being upset or down about it. We are on a mission to get home and we are going to complete it!  

Right now I am looking at Thursday/Friday arrival. It might even push back to Sat. We have light winds lately so we have been motoring a lot to keep moving but we are running low on fuel so we are going to just have to wait on the wind. But the good news, the forecast is looking like we will get more wind!

When we get about 24 hours out I will send you another Email letting you know. Then when we are about 3 hours out we should get cell service and I will call you and let you know a better ETA.

July 18th

Good morning follower's! it is 11:19 on July 18th 2011 and we're actually sailing towards home!!!! hopefully we'll be able to hold this till home but its been a good trip. we're all getting along still.... that's a miracle! but we've been doing good. we had movie night last night and took a break from watching "Castle" and watched "Rango" which i watched on the plane but its a good movie. i would like to thank our multimedia director Sean (Baby Doll) Gage for the hours of entertainment and for getting John and I hooked on "Castle" (and if anyone wants to buy me season 3 of Castle so when i get back i can find out what happens since we finished season 2 that'd be great). Now on a more serious note we have very hard news to talk about, its a tragedy and we're all trying our best to cope with this loss but it truly saddens me to inform everyone, in the wake of our delicious breakfast this morning it pains me to say that we've officially run out of Hash Brown's :( we are all doing our best to deal with this loss but i guess its oatmeal and cereal and occasionally biscuits and gravy or pancakes. other then that its going well, we have 880 miles left so its exciting. well its time to nap before my shift so till next blog have a great day! R.I.P Hash Browns 6/25/2011-7/18/2011

-Matt
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Slow but steady

The last few days we have been trucking right along under sail. Still heading east as we look for our big wind shift so we can finally head northeast. Days just blur together out here as we sleep, steer and cook. Occasionally we get to read or watch a movie/show.
Two nights ago as we were outside under the stars watching a movie, Matt spotted a moon bow! We have also passed two sailboats and 3 cargo ships all going in the opposite direction. Hum, maybe we're going the wrong way????
So we press on in sight of land fall.
--Jon

Google changes blog format...

Looks like the map of the geotagged posts was not a popular Google item, as it seems that it has been discontinued. So, unfortunately, those who wish to follow along can see only one location mapped out at a time, instead of all posts collectively on a map.


If you are not sure how to do this, just click on the "Location" at the very bottom of each post, and a new tab in your browser with the coordinates in Google maps should pop up. I'm pretty bummed out that this has been discontinued, as I thought it was pretty cool to be able to see the progress as it is being made across the ocean. Also, that's why we wanted to even use Google Blogger in the first place, as it was a free format that allowed others to see that progress. Oh well...if we ever do something like this again, I think we'll use Sailblogs.com, which plots locations automatically to Google Earth.

To Sail or to Motor?

After days and days of sailing without any lack of wind, we are going to run the motor for a while. We had trouble sending and receiving email due to lack of juice in the batteries. The solar panels can't quite keep up with our battery usage. The good news is that once motoring we will be aimed directly at home, after sailing in almost the direction of home, it will be a great feeling to actually point that direction. The seas have calmed down a bit, if the cockpit is dry enough we may be able to get the laptop out there for a movie night. Its the little things that are appreciated and exciting.
We thought we had discarded all of our condiments when we cleaned out the fridge but after some searching, I was fortunate enough to find some unopened mayo, hooray! This find along with some bread that has kept this long meant we had tuna sandwiches for breakfast, a nice change of pace from repeated meals.
The moon is getting brighter and brighter and closer and closer to being full every night. After your eyes adjust you can see well without any other source of light. The last few nights have been cloudy, when the moon peeks out from behind the clouds, its energizing and helps to get you through the nighttime watch shifts.
More than halfway home and getting closer.
--Sean
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Hello again! It is 2:53 on July the 9th 2011 and we are still sailing... haha the last couple of days have been alright, scattered high pressure equals motoring, sailing, motoring, sailing trying to make our was east. Right now we've been sailing for the last 48 hours in some good wind healing over quite a bit but we're still going out our day just fine, John made muffins this morning, i made mac&cheese and pasta last night or dinner so we're pretty acclimated to the rough seas. i finally cleaned out the quarter birth so now we have TWO comfortable places to sleep! no more wedging our selves in between the table and the seat cushion, like Sean said "it'll be nice to sleep somewhere you done have to use energy to keep from sliding, falling, crashing on who ever is beneath you". right now we have 1,700 miles under our belt and we're pretty sure we are half way home!!! well i would blog some more just to get out of my shift a lil longer but i don't know what else to blog about so i guess ill give John a break since he was off like 15 minutes ago hahaha. We'll try to update some more when we have a chance bye for now
-Matthew

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Happy Independence Day!

Have you ever tried powdered butter? Matt decided to try cooking mac and cheese for dinner last night, having just cleaned out the fridge of good food gone bad, we no longer had butter or milk. While we were waiting for the chef to finish with dinner, we caught another fish! Another delicious Mahi Mahi was on one of the hand lines behind the boat. I dare say this fish was larger than the last two Mahi Mahi we caught. We were all surprised to see the warm water fish this far north, as we passed our home latitude a day or two ago. Seems I learned a little technique from the last fish and had a much better time gutting, cleaning, and filleting the most recent catch. We got more meat and barely made any mess on the boat at all! Its a good thing we caught the fish, turns out Jon was not a fan of the mac and cheese prepared with powdered butter so we had fresh Mahi Mahi and rice burritos instead.

The ocean surface was so smooth on watch last night. I could see the reflections of individual stars. Smooth enough to even see a reflection of the big dipper constellation on the waters surface. I've only seen lakes with water this glass like and smooth. After the rough seas we had leaving Hawaii, its a drastic change of sea state to the ocean so docile and calm. Though this is an interesting new way to see the pacific, where did all the wind go? Sailing without wind is like trying to use facebook without internet.

--Sean

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Confortable Sailing

The last few days has been comfortable, if you can use that word to describe life on the sea. We have had constant 15-18 knots of wind allowing us to make our way north pretty quickly. The nights have been relatively dry with squalls being fewer and farther between. On the late night/early morning shifts you are able to look up at thousands of stars lighting up the sky with scattered clouds that floating by like huge piles of cotton balls. The only sound you can hear is the water splashing up against the hull of the boat.

We are losing our stable wind now only able to sail for few hours then fire up the motor for a few and back to sailing. Hopefully we only have 200 miles give or take a few before we can find a wind shift the will carry us in the direction of Channel Islands. It will be a comforting feeling when we start heading in the direction of home.

Yesterday was Sean's B-Day. He asked us to shorten a few afternoon shifts so that he can have the sunrise shift in the morning. Also we baked him a huge brownie!

--Jon

Yesterday was my birthday, and I started the day with watching the sunrise during the 4am-7am watch shift, I was rocking just my board shorts almost to the end of the shift and then got hit with a squall in the last few minutes. Was an excellent way to start my 27th birthday. We took turns watching some movies on my laptop, the only nice thing about motoring is that we have power to charge all of our electronics. We all shared one giant brownie for my birthday and had birthday pasta with chicken to share for dinner. I am now the eldest sailor on this vessel. I did miss talking to all my family and friends on my birthday, I didn't get one email, phone call, text message, or facebook update.. ha, I'll check later.

We are all up most of the day, chatting, reading, hanging out, cleaning up the boat and taking turns at the helm before we all scramble to sleep as much as we can between shifts at night. 3 hour watch shifts give us all 6 hours of downtime between turns at the helm, this seems to be working well so far, and the times rotate daily so you are never on the same watch schedule 2 days in a row and each of us gets their chance for the sunrise, sunset, middle of the nights shifts. Tonight I am on from 1-4 am, which means I will get to stargaze for hours and probably see a handful of shooting stars. Its a peaceful time to think and take in all that is happening. Shenanigans seems so insignificant compared to all the ocean before us, and even more so when you look up at night and compare our spot on this world to all the distant and far off suns.

We had to throw out some food that had spoiled in the fridge, so no more butter, cheese, or fresh non canned chicken.. You will be missed. I will now appreciate the comfort foods even more upon our return. The good part is now we don't have to worry about trying to run the icebox so much and keep an eye on the batteries and solar panels.

Ta ta for now!
--Sean

Read the above

--Matt
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First few days out

We apologize for not keeping you up dated on our progress but we finally have some calm weather. So to compress the last 5 days in one blog we'll start from the beginning.

Day 1. We set sail for the mainland.... not really knowing whether we're going north or south but we just wanted to get going and keep watching the weather while we go, we made it about 100 miles north our first day but beating up wind all day and night wasn't fun for anyone but we figured we'd try to suck it up and see how long we can do it.

Day 2. After beating up wind we decided to see what its like on the other tack so we decided to go south, same situation though beating up wind healed over wasn't fun at all but we sucked it up for another 100 miles until we looked at the chart plotter and realized we pretty much ate 60 miles back tracking so we felt pretty dumb but it was funny.... kind of haha.

Day 3. Day 3 went well, we still haven't eaten a real meal yet because we still weren't used to the rocking so much but I did manage to make some bean burritos so we got some sustenance's in us, after some crew deliberation we finally decided to sail north. We tacked over and headed north...... again haha.

Day 4. so we like this tack allot more cause it's a beam reach most the time and we're sailing at around 5-7 knots depending on the wind but its really comfortable, pretty much the only exciting thing that happened was we caught a Mahi Mahi, trying to filet it while on the bow was very interesting, Sean and I hacked at it and after some what fighting we got it filleted. John was going to be kind and bring in the second hand line so we didn't catch another fish, one is enough for us all to eat, but he was too late. We already had another Mahi Mahi on the other line. It was small and we didn't need two fish so we let it go, but we will be having fish tacos soon! John made some pasta that night so we're starting to eat some more each day.

That's pretty much it for now we apologize for not keeping you up dated but we'll be up dating more often bye for now from the crew of Shenanigans.

-Matthew