Saturday, August 9, 2014

August 9 Position Report

8/9/14 Wandering Dolphin POS

0700 Seattle Time / 1300 GMT
N 48 29.46  W 132 32.82
COG 085T
SOG 5-6 kts
DMG 220 nautical miles (2-days)
DTG  414 nautical miles (all the way to Blaine)

Wind SW 16-18
Pressure: 29.9
Temp: 66F
Sky: mostly cloudy
Seas: 4-5 ft in W swells
Sails: double reefed main and slight reefed main

Good Morning,

First let me apologize for not sending out a report yesterday.  I was reminded by a couple of you on the sat msgs that when we don't send one out you fear something might have happened.  I assume that those of you who think that only get the blog and not our Facebook posts through our Delorme InReach.  We did post on Facebook throughout the day yesterday.  If you have not liked our Facebook page it is called "Wandering Dolphin" and we post real time on it throughout the day and also a lot of pictures when we are in Internet land.

Yesterday both Rebecca and myself had terrible headaches.  Hers is from a sinus infection and mine is from a change in temperature and pressure.  Basically we put Emily in charge of the boat and we slept all day.

There has been at least one whale who we have named "Hubert" following along with the boat for a few days.  He comes up often right beside the boat and follows in our wake.  Then he will disappear for a few hours and show up again later.  Today we thought maybe he had a friend with him but I still think it was just the same whale.  He is a small humpback.  He must be an adolescent and have gotten separated from his family or something.  He seems to think the black bottom of WD looks like a hot whale chick and he has decided to keep her company.  Today he swam off in front of the boat and then came right back toward us and down the side.  None of his actions seem aggressive just curious.  It does make me happy again that we have a metal boat.  He's big enough to hole a wooden or glass boat if he did decide to get ticked off.

The wind changed to the SW night before last and increased to 15-18 and the steady blow has boosted our speed.  We have the jib reefed for comfort and the main is double reefed.  We could put out more sail and make a lot better speed but in these following seas it makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride if we do.  It has been cloudy and cold and we are already missing our warm little Honeymoon Bay.

The boys are looking forward to Saturday no school today.  They will sleep in and I will take a double watch and let the ladies sleep too.  When Beck gets up around 10:00 she will make pancakes and we have a can of apple pie filling left which she will mix with some sweetened condensed milk (it's just like caramel after being in storage for a while) and that will top our pancakes.  Last night we had baked beans and biscuits for supper because we were all out of pizza stuff.  Tonight we are going to make a spaghetti lasagna with leftover pepperoni, mozzarella cheese, and cottage cheese that was frozen and sauce from a can.  We have no lasagna noodles so we'll layer cooked spaghetti noodles and bake it... Might be tasty... We'll let you know.

Messages:
Jim V.  The sea life and smells do change as you get closer to shore... However we are still 500 miles out so not yet.  We will let you know how far out we are when we first start to get the hint of land.  Usually one of the first indicators is little land birds that have been blown offshore will land and rest on the boat.  When we were approaching Hawaii we smelled land about three days out.  One of the other indicators is radio chatter.  We heard our first ship to ship chatter today and once we start hearing the regular US Coast Guard chatter that always tells us we are getting close.

Brent-Gilroy: Sorry again for no POS.  To answer your question; We have not seen any of the stuff that is supposed to be floating out here.  We have seen hardly any trash and no floating junk from Japan.  The only interesting man made stuff has been several of the large fishing buoys.  We really expected to see a lot of trash and we went right through the area where they say it all is but we must have missed it.

Aline: we sure wish we could have met you guys in person too.  I'm sure there will be a time.

Len: not sure the Marine Traffic thing will pick ours up since it doesn't send out any actual report by anything except VHF signal.  The big ships transponders do but ours will only send out a report when we are within VHF range of a shore tower.  Unless ours uses a big ships to report which I doubt.  The amazing thing about this AIS though is the range.  I use the antenna at the top of the mast with a power booster in line and it picks up other ships sometimes at 100 miles away.

Alex:  exciting to hear about your plans.  Before you spend a ton of money on a new chart plotter you might want to talk to me about what we use now.  We exclusively use an iPad in a waterproof Lifeproof case with Navionics app and a Bluetooth bad elf for our GPS link to it.  Even though we have two Garmin plotters on board we haven't even used them for the entire voyage from St. Thomas.  I have used all of the various plotters on different deliveries and the iPad with Navionics is the best chartplotter I have ever used.  I'll chat with you about it when we get to shore if you are interested or have questions.

Terri:  I will try to get a nice photo of the Supermoon but most times the pictures don't really show the true feel of a large moon.  It looks pretty small in the photos no matter what.  Also we need a clear night.  Last night we could see its glow through the clouds but it hardly ever peeked through.

Steve: please tell K. that B. liked the msg and will email her back tomorrow.

Well it's sure nice to be moving!  Hubert is still with us this morning.

Have a Great Day!
Captain Tofer, Becca, EmilyAnne, Kanyon, Kaleb and Benny

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