Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes. 

Just checking to see who's paying attention. You can see from our track above that our latitude did not change very much. Guam is located at 13.4597°N, 144.6621° E and Carmen, Cebu at 10.5937° N, 124.0186° E.  Small change in latitude, but our attitudes were another story.   We learned to appreciated clouds, showers, cold water, oil filters, and autopilot!

My last post had us sailing West from Guam and through the first night of our sail to Cebu, Philippines. That first day would constitute the majority of the wind we would see for the entire voyage...

When we left the dock we had 125 gallons of diesel onboard. Nick was (unnecessarily) wondering what we would do with all of the extra fuel when we arrived at our destination. 😆😆😆

Glass. In the middle of the ocean.
But look at the clouds!

More on the fuel situation later.

If you've looked at the horizon in any of the pictures we've shared you may have noticed  a couple of things...

1. NO waves. Even when we did have some wind, it wasn't enough to stir the sea significantly. For that, we were grateful.
2. Clouds. If you haven't looked at the clouds in the photos, you should go back. The skies during each day were different because the clouds were always different. I can see how you could navigate and predict the weather by studying the clouds... before we had professionals to send us weather forecasts. Now we've gotten lazy. Look up.   The clouds also provided a sense of security to me. I have felt more isolated in the middle of Lake Michigan than I ever felt in the middle of the Philippine Sea. We were always surrounded by clouds at the horizon, making me feel like we were in the middle of a cove, or surrounded by land...especially when they were the "friendly" clouds.
3. For the most part, we look like we're just "chilling". This is mostly true...because who has time to take pictures when you're trimming sails or dealing with a situation. We did chill a lot. We also played games, watched movies, navigated, communicated, ate, filtered fuel, and, of course, 'played' with sails. We even tried fishing. Luckily we didn't catch anything...we really didn't want to deal with that mess 😝

Not only did we feel like we were surrounded by clouds, we also felt like we were surrounded by ships. Luckily, Stillwater has an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver. Most ships have an AIS transmitter that allows other vessels to see important information, such as how close the two vessels will be in a given amount of time. We decided after this voyage that Stillwater will soon have a transmitter as well as receiver. Since we were motoring/motorsailing much of the time, we actively avoided the much larger ships. There was that one time....we finally had some wind and had the spinnaker up...at night. I just could NOT bear the thought of losing our wind and shifting course to avoid a cargo ship so I was going to hail them on the radio and ask them to avoid us.... at first Nick did not support that decision because (we both know) big ships are not usually happy when small sailboats ask them to change course. Technically we had the right of way because we were under sail. However, it's still not favorable to ask a big ship to go around you...but I was going to call and ask them to do just that. Finally Nick gave in and contacted the ship. They may not have been happy about it, but they did alter their course to cross behind us.  Shortly after that we lost our wind anyway....We came in close contact to so many ships...how is that possible in the middle of the ocean?

The image below shows a live shot of the signals from ships around the world at the moment I was writing. Granted, each ship icon is not to scale....but it puts things in perspective.

My activity #3 above mentioned filtering fuel. Why did we have to filter fuel? MICROBES! Generally it's a good practice to keep water out of your fuel tanks. There are ways that water can get in regardless of your efforts, however, and it doesn't take much to encourage growth of microbes (bacteria or fungi) that will grow in the interface between the water and the fuel or on the walls of the tanks. When the "pre"filters began clogging regularly, Nick knew we had a problem that had to be dealt with before trying to motor into a channel. He built a fine mesh filter out of a pretzel container and some small metal screen he found and HAND PUMPED every gallon of fuel on the boat through the filter with a little bicycle type pump.

Cruising is NOT just about fixing things in exotic locations...it's also about tearing your kid's bed apart to filter the 60 gallons of fuel beneath it.

The first 7 days went by relatively quickly, and none of us could believe it had been a whole week since we had seen land. Even more surprising was the fact that we were all still getting along. I wouldn't say we fell into a routine so much as just went with "the flow". The kid took watches during the day and Nick and I alternated during the night.

The bottom triangle is the drift net buoy. Things
definitely got more stressful the closer we came to land.

Toward the afternoon of our 7th day, AIS alerted us that we were nearing a 20 mile drift net. Normally AIS could tell us the direction and speed of the vessel, and how close we might come to it. The thing about a drift net is...well, DRIFT. We had a great day of sailing (and pumping fuel while the engine was not running) and were preparing to tack back in the direction of our destination. The possibility of getting a 20 mile long net caught on the keel or propellor several hundred miles from shore stressed us out a bit so we took the sails down and motored slowly until we saw the buoy. By the time we saw it, it was abeam of us about a quarter of a mile away. We just hoped the net was deep enough that it would not cause problems. As we held our breaths we floated past the marker with no ill effects. Exhale. Look up and see a squall coming. Go down inside the cabin to get rain gear and hear the bilge pump running much more often than it should. We determined that I would handle navigating the squall while Nick investigated the cause of the overactive bilge pump. I managed to steer us around the worst part of the squall while enjoying a little cooling rain, but then looked down inside the cabin to see Nick tearing the cushions off of the port settee. There are two things behind there...the coconut medium for the composting head and the emergency bilge pump. Chances are he's not changing the poop container on the head at this very moment. I couldn't set the autopilot and go below to investigate the emergency, so I had to trust that he had everything under control...but if you've ever seen a movie or read about a sailboat rescue, it almost always involves the emergency bilge pump. My messenger boy didn't have any information either...all I got from him was "daddy is trying another spare pump because the first spare pump didn't work".  

While investigating the cause of the bilge pump running, Nick had discovered that the forward bilge was FULL of water. This is scary because there are three openings in the hull for various fittings up there. Three potential gushing holes. After clearing out the water with the emergency pump he could tell that no more water was coming in. Exhale again. Apparently the forward bilge pump hadn't been working for a while and the water from the air conditioning had gathered up there. The pump had been running for a much different reason...one that we were heading to the boatyard to have addressed...a not so small issue with our rudder assembly. But not enough water to panic :) So we motored on and hoped the oncoming electrical storm would leave us alone....

Whales!

After the excitement of the previous evening we were looking forward to hopefully our last day out of sight of land. Had some sails up, but still motorsailing because the boatyard had contacted us and told us they only had one opening available. We had return flight tickets and movers coming to our house the next week so we really needed to turn it up a bit..We were positively aiming to get to land ASAP, but then Nick and Leif spotted something in the distance that looked like a life raft. As we approached Leif and I discussed what we might discover should it be a life raft...and I started to hope that it wasn't. Nick was hoping he'd finally earn his Coast Guard Lifesaving medal. It turned out to be a large yellow cylinder. That's all I've got to say about that.

Also...laundry day!

As we got closer to the Philippine Islands, we started to see more small(ish) fishing boats. The first one we encountered on that same day shook us a bit. We could see an odd-shaped ship in the distance that did not appear on our radar or AIS. It actually looked like something from Star Wars...and there were many little satellite boats zooming around it. As we got nearer, the small boats left the vicinity of the large boat and at once sped toward us. We know there are hostile (pirate-not the disney kind) activities in the Southern Philippines, but we had hoped to stay far enough North to avoid any trouble. We had no idea what to expect as ten tiny boats sped toward us as their spaceship-like non radar-reflecting mother ship waited in the distance. As the closest one approached, he reached below and brought up something, pointing his hand at us the whole time. He was trying to sell us a large fish he had caught. These banca boats would be something we would become quite familiar with (and have to watch out for) for the rest of our trip.

1600 the next day brought LAND. Leif was the first to see, as I believe Nick and I were down below pumping more fuel...

The current was pretty strong approaching land, and at this point Leif was confident enough to alter our course to account for the current. He neglected to check with us first, however, and when we spotted him messing with the autopilot his response was, "we're never going to get there otherwise!" He was right.

Among the new things we got to try out on this trip was our new anchor chain and anchor. We had never anchored before because the old equipment was not adequate. So, for our first experience anchoring with new equipment, we also got to try it at night. Because adventure, right?

The fishing village in Suluan was able to sell us 10 gallons of fuel. Remember in the beginning when I said Nick was wondering what he was going to do with all that extra fuel? Turns out we motored much more than we had planned. 

After a full night of sleep and a swim/shower that felt SO good, we were on our way through the Philippine Islands, and lots more banca boats... which made our journey through the islands to Cebu a bit more stressful...

A quick swim and shower never felt so good!