Throughout the doldrums (ITCZ), winds became light, but the angle became less conducive to being able to fly the Parasailor. Progress was steady, but slow, which frankly, is just fine with us. We’ll all take a 110 mile flat seas day over a 170 mile roller coaster day every time. I’d estimate the loss of the Code Zero sail (blown out while we were leaving Banderas Bay) cost us about 100 miles overall. So, while it would have been nice to use two or three times on this trip, it certainly wouldn’t have been worth it to us to turn around for sail repairs.

scene: Total darkness. Ali on watch. Kids and Pat sleeping.

[long, ear-piercing scream]

“Pat! Pat, help!”

[ear-piercing scream continues]

Anyone who knows Ali knows that she screams. It’s just her natural instinct, completely out of her control. When you walk into a room that she is in with her back turned to you, regardless of the time of day, if you don’t shuffle your feet or announce your presence somehow, she will scream. The caveat is that if you simply say her name as you enter the room, that will elicit a scream, too. Avoiding a scream is a delicate procedure.

Ouest came up the other night when I was on watch. She was hot and needed some fresh air. She peeked around the corner in the darkness and said, “I’m glad it’s you, mama would have woken everyone up.” So, yeah, we’re all aware of Ali’s proclivity for the startled scream.

Anyway, I’m in a deep exhausted sleep you can only get after two weeks of night watches at sea, when I hear the screams. First tenth of a second my mind thinks, man overboard or looming collision. Second tenth of a second my body is rolling and sitting up in the dark. Third tenth, burst towards where open door is assumed to be, though it’s too dark to see, and my eyelids may or may not have opened yet. Fourth tenth of a second, face hits end of open door at full speed. Fifth tenth of a second, stars, and the realization I’d misjudged where the door’s opening was by about a foot. Sixth tenth of a second, keep moving forward, hand cupped over face to catch warm blood.

Seventh tenth of a second…

[scream] “Pat! Fish! Fish!”

Ali had been sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, half-asleep herself, while waiting for the alarm to chime twenty minutes so she could go outside and have a peek around before settling back to another half-asleep twenty-minute watch. Ahead of the boat scattered the ever-present flying fish. Above her loomed an open hatch.

Flying fish have a way of hitting you. They seem to use the opposite system that bats do with their echolocation. While bats use echolocation to avoid obstacles, flying fish must use something similar to zero in and hit their target. Just a couple nights earlier I took a flying fish to the ribs. He had to thread a pretty tight needle to make that kill shot.

On this night, the fish in question had launched himself eight to ten feet in the air, avoided the sails and all the other bits of the boat, hit the angled hatch window, and landed perfectly in Ali’s lap where he flopped around and elicited untold amounts of screaming.

By now all four of us were standing in the kitchen, a light had been turned on, blood was dripping pouring into my hand, down my arm, and dripping off my elbow, and the fish was silently looking up at me thinking, “Well, bud? You gonna toss me back in, or what?”

North of the equator we had two Pollywogs onboard the boat. Ali and I, of course, have been Shellbacks for many years, but our kids had never crossed the equator on a boat before, and were therefore still very low on the totem pole. Fourteen days at sea solved that problem. We all watched as the latitude slowly tick down until that fateful moment when the N became an S, and our two Pollywogs became Shellbacks. Congratulations to Ouest (13) and Lowe (11) on what I consider quite an impressive feat.

Over the past twenty years I’ve become one of them, a graybeard.

Time to celebrate our new shellbacks with rice krispie bars and cheap champagne.

King Neptune got a swig of champagne, and then we asked him to deliver a letter for us.

Energy issues are plaguing us right now. As mentioned, our two refrigerators and freezer’s compressors are all running 24 hours a day. I don’t know how or why three thermostats would all malfunction at the same time, but that appears to be the problem. Ventilation might be a contributing factor, but this boat isn’t brand new, and I doubt previous owners would have lived with this, especially as they had only about half the battery and solar power that we do now. Regardless, once we get anchored, I’ll have a lot of troubleshooting to do over this problem.

The second energy issue is that the port alternator is overcharging. I believe the regulator is the problem, as it appears to be allowing 16.05volts to go right on through to the system, causing immediate alarms. Unable to solve this I’ve had to resort to disconnecting the alternator completely.

So, the situation is that we’ve got about 420 ah of usable battery capacity. Incoming ah from solar are probably in the +200 ah range each day. Meanwhile, the fridges and freezer are drawing an insane -360 ah/day. Add in autopilot, GPS, AIS, running lights, and the inverter for charging computers and running Starlink for a couple hours a day, and it all adds up to WAY too much power going out, and not nearly enough coming in. We’ve got far more battery capacity and solar power than we’ve ever had on any boat before, and yet we can’t keep up.

If we were sailing to the States I’d have all new thermostats, a new Engle freezer, and a Victron DC/DC regulator for the alternator all waiting for us upon arrival. In French Polynesia I’ve got no hope of getting any of these any time soon, so I have to figure out how to fix these problems with nothing but what’s on the boat.