Day 1 And we’re off! – Sailors warning this contains graphic material

Well it was a slow start to the day and it was harder to leave Hawaii than I had anticipated. Although I am really excited to get to Alaska and explore SE, I really felt like leaving Hawaii was a big turning point for the trip as there would be no more warm water swimming and jumping off the boat with Fynn.

We had an auspicious start when attempting to get the stern anchor up. It has set itself so well into the sand that it took two attempts to break it free. When we finally got the anchor up and I motored out of the anchorage I took one final look at Hanalei Bay and heard Kevin shout “where is the white buoy?”.

Well as it turns out the white buoy we had tied to the anchor to mark our stern line had fouled on our prop and was stuck under the boat. Not ten seconds into our trip the first problem had reared its ugly head and I had to dive into the water and cut away the extra line and retrieve the buoy. Thanks to Ron for having his trusty knife on hand.

After that it was smooth and exciting sailing. The plan is to head due north until the wind starts to back and then make our way around the North Pacific high. The high is sitting right in our path as if this writing but who knows what a couple days will bring!

Just as my shift was ending at 0400 the wind instruments were giving funky readings. The wind rotated almost 180 degrees and shot up 43kts of apparent wind speed.

The boat sailed around in a half circle, now the actually wind had not really shifted so the sails filled in from behind and I was forced to furl them in and motor to get back on course.

Once I had figured out that the instruments were acting up I tried to reset the NMEA2000 network to get the wind instruments up and running. While I was waiting for the system to reboot, Kevin and unfurled the main sail to start sailing along again. We pulled the main sail out all the way and set our course for about 60 degrees apparent.

We were moving along very nicely at 6.5 kts with the main alone but the instruments were still not working. I now had the autopilot on and decided to reset the network again.

DO NOT ATTEMPT  THIS AT HOME

Well, just as my luck would have it, the NMEA system reset but lock the autopilot ram in a fixed position. When this happened the boat began an ever so slow turn and began to gybe. Kevin went to turn off the breaker to the instruments but by the time he got downstairs the gybe was completed and we had a small crash gybe (remember we were only trimmed for sailing at 60 degrees apparent) so I thought no harm no foul and set things up for Kevin and went to grab some sleep.

A couple hours later Kevin wakes me up and says “Kolby you should come look at the boom. There is a bend in it that I don’t remember being there before”

Yup that’s right folks, 16 hours into our passage from Hawaii to Alaska we broke the boom. Oh well only 2400 miles to go.

Want to help?

https://www.gofundme.com/helpasunto