Details of a Sea Voyage; Sailor James Discusses Various Topics While On An Ocean Passage

Hello friends, my name is James and this is my 1965 Alberg 30 sloop Tritea. We are on a mission to sail around the world and see as much of this beautiful planet as possible. We're currently working our way through the South Pacific. I can't wait to show you everything we see. Hello friends, I'm getting ready to depart for American Samoa. I want to give you guys a little walkthrough tour of what Tritea looks like when she's in passage making mode. And then we'll look down below first and then we'll go up on deck and have a peek. And it's a beautiful day here in Bora Bora and I'll be departing in a few hours. So let's look at how I set Tritea up for these longer passages. The first significant thing that I do is I make my pilot berth. So I turn the cabin into sleeping quarters and these are lee cloths that you can untie. You can stow them under the bunk or under the the cushion when you're not at sea so they're not in the way. But when we're underway and the boat's rocking and rolling or we're heeled over then this keeps me from getting thrown out onto the floor. I have them on the other side too but the other side bunk is very short. Even I'm very short but it's even shorter. So this is where I always sleep and then this is like my lazy boy recliner where I always sit and do all my business right by the chart table. I have my books all here. I keep power bars right next to a quick grab. I have Dramamine in case I'm feeling crappy. I can go ahead and not have to dig around looking for a pill if I'm feeling like crap. I've got my log book here getting ready to take down our daily noon positions and that's the jam for the sleeping arrangement for the passages. So one other nice thing about this berth is that I can lay here and see the iPad that's over the chart table so I can see our course and when the actual wind meter up top is working which it's not working at when it's working I can see the wind speed and all that stuff but none of that really matters. You don't really need to know wind speed and the more you sail the more you know what the wind is just from the sound and from feeling it. But this is that's a nice thing that I can kind of see what's happening from this and then I can easily quickly get out into the cockpit and handle the business of shortening sail if needed. Got our galley which you guys have most of you have seen underway which gets bonkers. So that's all ready to go. This is just like this is the other berth this is my life raft which I hope to never have to use. Got my lee cloth up and here's my spinnaker so it's easy grab access. I got dry clothes and a dry bag like clean and dry underwear and shirts and stuff like that. It's like Tritair doesn't have a ton of leaks but it seems like no matter what things get wet inside a boat when you're underway. So moving forward the V bar it turns into a stowage area. I've got I put down a tarp over the mattress because these do these old bronze hatches tend to leak. So those guys you know it's going to protect the mattress it'll just accumulate on this tarp and then I have a bunch of stuff just stowed forward. I push it that way so that it if this these hatches leak then it's not it's not going to get everything sopping wet. And normally I put the outboard engine right here and the dinghy but on this trip we're going to do something different and we'll talk about that when we get outside. All right let's head out on deck and have a look at that. Here we are so so normally I put the outboard forward but this trip I'm going to start out keeping it on the stern rail and see how she does. If it feels like uh it's not no good then I'll put her forward. The only reason it wouldn't be good is because it's adding more weight to the stern and I have very low freeboard anyway. So I think it's going to be okay if it's not I can easily take that off and get it forward it's not a problem. There's that let's go forward there's the dinghy. That's another thing this is first time I've ever going to be doing a longer passage with the dinghy on the foredeck. Normally I deflate it roll it up put it in a bag down below but since this is only like a nine day passage and it's following seas um if we were beating into waves there's no way I would leave it on the foredeck because it's like that's a lot for the waves to hit and it could damage the dinghy or the boat. So but since we're going to be running with the seas kind of from now on until we sail from Fiji to New Zealand I think it's going to be okay and again it's something that if it seems not chill I can easily like drop sail it would be annoying but I could drop sail roll up the dinghy on the foredeck and put it down below but I don't think it's going to be a problem. Normally I like to keep the decks really clear of anything uh even fuel cans and stuff I find ways to stow them in the cockpit lockers so that there's not as much for waves to hit um when we're in rough seas but again this passage is we're running with everything so I think it's going to be great. I have it elevated still because I have to unhook the mooring lines and then I'll motor out and get it secured before we leave the lagoon here at Bora Bora and uh yeah everything's ready to go here's the beautiful mountain the lagoon and I am excited and ready for this passage. So on my regular morning deck check where I'll go out check the rigging all the connections you know just kind of get a look at everything look up top see how the looks check the sails check the lines for chafing I discovered that one of the the webbings or the slides that hold the mainsail to the slide that goes up the mast has chafed through at the second batten car so we need to lower the mast to that car lower the mast we need lower the sail to that car and I need to lash it with Dyneema lash and um then we can go ahead and re-raise the mainsail um it's between the second and third reef points if it was below the second reef point I may just have just reefed it down and fixed it in American Samoa because the motion is so kind of silly but the winds aren't as bad right now as they're supposed to get this afternoon so I'd rather try to fix it now I don't want to lose speed I don't want to have the main reef down to the third reef that's absurd we'd lose so much speed it's unnecessary so it's going to be a little bit of a circus stunt to get this thing lashed but it'll be okay um I'll just go forward tie myself to the mast and um get it knocked out so let's get that project started so slight change uh plans as far as how we're going to approach this I realized I'm just going to try to zip tie that slide onto the mainsail we only need it to last for like four days so I'm going to do three zip ties heavy zip ties and um we'll see if that works that would be a nice quick solution with this sort of motion and if not then later on you know I might regret it but then we can always lash it with dyneema but let's go ahead and yeah let's just zip tie this thing on and see if that works made quick work of that considering the sea state um got a loose lashing of dyneema cord on to get that slide taken care of I put zip ties on it that a few days ago they had chafed through last night so went ahead and got that and um seems like everything this is Friday seems like everything's kind of coming down finally as it was forecasted to the winds are kind of up and down but they're coming down the sea state while big it doesn't feel like it's charging as hard as it was yesterday or last night so that's great and then it's supposed to come down to like 14 18 knots tomorrow and then 14 knots on Sunday and then we should be we should be getting in Monday looking like it we're doing really good really good runs um last night yesterday's noon to noon was 129 miles so we're doing good and all is well okay so I want to show you guys what I do on passage every day at noon I log our noon position and take it down in the log book put it on the chart plotter which I use Navionics for my navigation software for passes making so any minute now the alarm is going to go off on my iphone and we'll start the process I've sailed with the captain in the past who took down his position every six hours and wrote it in the log book which is really good practice I used to do it at noon and midnight when I first started doing passage making and now I've gotten to where I just do it at noon it would probably be better for me to do it both noon and midnight just because then if you lose all gps and everything you know within 12 hours of where your last position was it's a little harder to kind of lose everything nowadays um like that you know because we have a gps signal here we have a gps signal in the vhf we have a kind of spotty gps signal in the iphone I also have a puck that I can plug into my laptop that gives me a gps location so we have a lot of different options for gaining that even if we lost all electricity to the boat the ipad and the my Garmin puck which I use this is the gps puck I use they both have batteries so even if the batteries died for the boat initially we would be able to get it from there same thing with the iphone but it's good to note that the gps in an iphone is very spotty at sea so I haven't really been able to get a solid fix for like three days on my iphone I like to do it lock my position on my phone and my ipad so I have a redundancy there as well as a logbook also if I'm just laying in the berth I can kind of check where we were how what distance we've covered yada yada but same things happen on so there's our alarm so stop that and what we do is go into here and there's our I'm not sure how well you can see this but it's navionics you can see our position I hit the little pin and it gives us a pin to mark our position I go in and I name it crash of course when I'm filming it crashes doesn't crash too often but that's the problem with ipad right and not a built-in chartplotter so I've got our pin here that we just made and we'll go ahead and name it noon day this is the start of day eight for me the eighth day at sea so I put noon day eight and then I put as for American Samoa because I have so many other passages that it would be named the same if I just did it noon day eight so there's that we've got that name and then we'll go ahead and take down our position I got my logbook with all my positions so today is the 24th of September it's 14 degrees 55 minutes 0.979 seconds south by 166 degrees 39 minutes 013 seconds west and then once we've got that logged down we can go back we can zoom out to our previous day's pin which is over here I touch that and it tells me in Navionics that we've done 121 we are currently 121 nautical miles from that pin so that's what I log is my distance traveled for the day 121 and then I'll go back in and add up like I keep my totals on the same below on the same line so that I can know the total distances of the passage so far so that's all done and then we go back and now what I'll do is I'll get into I'll pull open my computer and I'll go into the tracker blog and I'll put in the new position our day's run and then that gives us gives us another point showing not just us on the boat but the rest of the world shore team my loved ones at noon today that's exactly where I was so if I just go radio silence they know where to look so that's how you go about that and I don't know if you can see it but we are this pink line if you can see it this pink line is our intended run line to American Samoa now the winds have backed which means that they are changing direction in a counterclockwise manner and we're going to have to go up and change our sail configuration right now we're running wing and wing but the winds are backed and they're going to continue to back they're backing from easterlies which means they're coming from the east to north easterlies and our current sail configuration it's not possible to sail wing and wing with the way that the and the winds are going to keep backing until by 3 p.m they're going to be kind of where they're going to be for the next three days so I'm going to go ahead and finish up all this and then let's me and you guys go on deck and we'll talk about what the cell configuration is currently and then what we're going to do to try to get on our run line and get sailing the correct course so the seas are still kind of silly at the moment I've turned off these auto leveling function on the camera so that it's not quite as seasick while I show you guys what I'm about to do we'll go ahead and talk through the parts of wing and wing now for any seasoned sailors you guys already know this this little part of the video is for people who either just got into sailing or they don't know anything about sailing just to explain what wing and wing sailing is it's really fun thing to do and the only way that you can sail when the wind is directly behind you so let's look at that setup real quick okay the first thing I want to point out is we have the paid very far out we have it paid out to starboard and when you have the boom paid this far out you must have what's called a preventer line on which is a line that secures the boom leading forward so that when the wind gets on the wrong side of the sail it doesn't send the boom flying around dangerously that's called a crash jibe and it can knock someone out knock someone overboard or even kill them if it hits them in the head hard enough or it can come around and take out your rigging on the opposite side and bring your mast down potentially so you have to you always want to have a preventer out when you're sailing with your boom swung out to the extreme like this another thing to know about preventers is that you always want your preventer at the boom's end a lot of contemporary sailboats have their main sheet in the middle of the boom and if you clip it there and you send it forward and you tighten that thing down when your boat rolls in the water if it hits the wave hard enough it can snap your boom right at that point so like imagine you got all this tension right in the middle that's a break point right because there's a hole there for your main sheet when that boom goes in the water you know a big wave which it always does I see you do it five times a day when it hits there's nothing to support that booms in and it'll just snap very common so even if your main sheet and everything is in the middle of your boom you want to make sure that your preventer is on the boom's end leading as far forward as possible now in Tritea I have a line on either side already set up and I have permanent blocks installed at the bow so my preventer goes all the way the bow and then all the way back to the cockpit and you'll see as we start bringing it in you just pay out a little bit on the preventer and then you bring in your main sheet so you can safely get that boom in and that way nothing gets damaged and no one gets hurt now on the headsail we have a whisker pole and that's a little bitty pole it's it's much smaller than a spinnaker pole which is the use for the spinnaker sail it's very large whisker pole is usually telescopic you can make it go different distances it's really lightweight it clips on one side to the mast and on the other end it just kind of hooks on to the line of your headsail and that allows you to keep your sail out and when you're sailing with the big seas your boat tends to swerve back and forth back and forth and what happens is when it swerves too far one way or the other then the wind gets behind the sail and it collapses loses power it flogs there's all kinds of silly stuff so much like the preventer is keeping our boom out for wing and wing our whisker pole is keeping our headsail out so that it can quickly refill with wind when it gets back on course and be as efficient as possible and pulling the boat through the water now this is the only way to sail a boat dead downwind that is a sloop or a catch or anything like that so in the age of sail you saw the big square rigger boats a lot of people associate like pirate ships and you know ships of the line so they had big square sails and they you know that's why they sailed primarily in the trade winds because the wind's from behind which meant they couldn't sail upwind very well well contemporary boats you can sail almost in any wind direction except dead into the wind so to sail dead downwind you either run a spinnaker if it's really light wind or you sail wing and wing and get the most out of what you got okay it's time to bring in this sail configuration and then we'll see what kind of setup we're going to do with the direction the wind is going right now and what our course line is to be this is the end of my preventer right here and i'm just going to pay it out a little bit not much because the sea's still doing its business while you're trying to get this bring in this a little bit and in a minute it's going to find its way and come straight midships but so now that's tight i'll lock that down the main sheet down i paint a little bit more see now go ahead and see how slack it is just do it real slow so it doesn't get away from you silly moves pay it out a little bit okay there we go now she's safely in midships now i want to go the winds have gotten so light i'm going to go ahead and shake out my second reef now and then we'll see what kind of sail configuration we need to be set up on to keep sailing all right i got the reef the second reef shaken out of the mainsail now i'm going to alter our course and see what we need to do elsewhere now i'll turn the course on the wind vane there's just this little control line here and you just turn it and it turns the the top unit there see where that gets us i think that's a little bit much and our headsaw is staying full so i think we can lose the whisker pole and just get to sailing regular i'm going to leave the whisker pole for now on that headsail because i feel like at the angle the wind is it's going to collapse a lot but i don't think that the wind is behind us enough to go wing and wing on the opposite side so we're going to leave this set up for now sail for about an hour and see if we want to change it it'd be better if we could get rid of the pole and pay out more headsail but i don't i think the mainsail is gonna be wind shadowing that headsail so i think this is our best configuration at the moment we are about 14 miles from manua islands and um i want to try to show you guys something about like the way the ancient polynesian wayfinders would read the waves and the currents and stuff i'm not sure how well it'll translate on camera but i want to talk to you guys about what i'm seeing i believe there's a north running current right now there's about nine knots of wind um and that's apparent to me by the fact that just how it feels first of all and secondly there's just like a hint of white caps on the little wavelengths the sea is very calm right now but the white caps really start around 10 knots to be kind of like you know obvious but there's just kind of a hint of these little white caps so i'm guessing around nine knots and currently the winds are coming kind of almost out of the north yeah they're coming straight out of the north at the moment and you can see in the little wavelets with this little bit of wind the little wavelets are very steep which tells me that the current is running to the north so coming out of the south and um that's one of the things that the polynesian wayfinders talked about that's how they one of the ways they could read current other than taking especially when you're offshore and you couldn't see land or anything in there in their outrigger canoes is they would look at how steep the wavelets are and the texture they they would describe the the texture of the sea is being very tight and so you can see the texture on the surface with as little wind as there is there's a lot of texture which tells me that it's wind against current so so that's that's pretty amazing you know it takes a lifetime of those cats being taught that by masters and about being in the sea especially reading the stars and that stuff for me i'm just like someone that's interested in the process i don't believe i'll ever be able to really use those as navigation but it's fun to notice them and to think about how they populated the entire pacific southern pacific and you know micronesia and stuff with no metal no compasses just by reading the elements that is beyond fascinating to me so i just wanted to share that with you guys um pretty neat there's so many lessons to be learned from the polynesian wave finders so people are always asking me on these passage videos if i'm fishing all the time or why am i not fishing um and if you saw my first long passage video from los angeles hawaii you saw how i did try to catch a tuna when i was swarmed by tuna and my line snapped or am i not failed i'm not sure which i'm new to fishing so um it was likely like my fault that that did not work out but um one of the there's a few reasons there are several reasons i'm not fishing constantly one is i don't like to take anything i don't need and i'm generally always very well stocked with food it's no secret that our seas are heavily overfished by factory fishing and uh if i have food then you know i don't i don't see a need to pull something from the sea just for fun um and there's nothing you know being well stocked with food i just don't see a reason for me to be fishing while on passage which leads us to the other reason is that whatever i'm going to catch is likely going to be pretty big because of where i'm fishing and because of the gear i'm using and since i'm a solo sailor it would be kind of a bummer i don't have much of a freezer it's a very small freezer doesn't really get that doesn't really freeze anything so much of the fish would go to waste or go to waste by human consumption throwing anything overboard it gets consumed by something on some level in the sea right but i would hate to you know pull something out of the sort of like reproductive system of the sea i would hate to pull something out of the sea and then only be able to eat a small amount of it um i'd rather that thing just keep living and keep reproducing more fishes so if there were two of us on board if you know there was somebody else on board i would be fishing constantly because it'd be a lot easier for me to justify twice the demand of food and also you know twice that wouldn't be wasted through human consumption and twice that wouldn't be wasted in regards to like humans consuming it um so those are the sort of main reasons another reason is like the sea state like for this entire passage other than today it was either pretty extremely rolly or high winds or big seas and the idea of like if i caught a fish then i would have to be out here filleting it and those kind of conditions did not did not appeal to me so and like i said i'm new to fishing and if you had seen if you saw the passage video if you saw the hawaii passage video you saw that i was using a cuban yo-yo which is what i'll be using again today i have a really nice pin rod and a pin squall two reel so i've got a full setup and i have lures and all kinds of stuff if i ever needed to fish seriously for food i got i'm well stocked but cuban yo-yos are very common on sailboats and um or hand reels whatever they call them so they're just they're easy they're simple and um that's what we're going to be using today and i put on a cedar plug i put on a cedar plug and um luckily it's got a nice long leader and luckily it has its own crimped leader that i had nothing to do with the fabrication of so because i think that's what happened on my last time i was trying to fish is like i think my knot failed so we're going to go ahead and get this in the water so we're going to go so we're going to go ahead and get this in the water we are right alongside we're like i don't know 10 miles off of manua islands so this is a good spot i think to be fishing and then we'll just kind of run this until sunset and see if we get any bites i got my gaff hook ready i got my net ready knives and all that stuff so we'll see if we can catch ourselves some dinner and um go from there all right there we go got it all set up we'll see if we catch some dinner it's like 5 30 in the afternoon just brought in my fishing line we did not catch anything so i'll be making food tonight i hope you've enjoyed this special episode i wanted to put this together to show you kind of a closer look at some of the finite details of past making a lot of which will end up on the cutting room floor when trying to make a film that is more entertaining and less technical if you enjoy the content on this channel and would like to contribute you can consider joining the patreon crew thanks for watching fair winds until next time