Sailing Faith: The Long

Way Home

The Gregg A Granger

Family Adventure

 Wahoo!!!

After several days of easy sailing in easy seas, the wind grows tired.  The water calms. We sit.  We swim a couple of times which is an experience a thousand miles from land, in water where depth is also measured in miles.  We motor several days until concerns of needing the motor in the future become greater than the frustration of so little progress.  We have food on board, and a working water maker.  The food that I mentally inventory doesn’t include the fish caught since leaving Isabela.  It’s not that I forget to count them, but of the five fish on the line, we land exactly none of them.   Some of the fish that we don’t catch are big, judging from the song the reel sings.

We have three lures that I bought in Hampton, cedar plugs – hollow, cigar shaped pieces of cedar, with a lead weight on one end.  The line runs through the hollow to a hook.  After school in the first day of Greggii’s boredom, I find some of his sisters’ nail polish and tell him to paint whatever he wants on them.  He paints one of them red chrome, silver chrome, and blue chrome, in the manner you’d expect of 6 year old hands on a rocking boat.  This ends up being our all-time best fishing lure.

On the subject of fishing, I find a good way to occupy Greggii’s hands and mind is cleaning the tackle box.  He likes doo-hickeys and gadgets more than most six-year-olds and other than the sharp pointed objects in a tackle box that our Prevention Specialist makes note of, a better collection of doo-hickeys and gadgets doesn’t exist on Faith.

No wind and short on fuel.  Faith is drifting as fast as any coconut bobbing around in the same water.  Lorrie notes our heading – the direction the front of the boat points – sometimes to Antarctica, sometimes to Alaska, occasionally the Galapagos Islands.  The autopilot is turned off because it takes motion through the water for the rudder to work.  We are moving with it, not through it and it doesn’t matter which way the bow points, the water is going to the Marquesas, and we are stuck to the water.

Bath time on passage

Taking a break on passage