After a two days of nice sailing (despite my feeling seasick), on Friday (first night of Passover) I was seasick and went down for a nap early afternoon. We were headed along with nice Easterly breeze, but seas were growing. By the time I got up a few hours later, we were already pounding into it with seas up to 8 feet and the winds turning more on the nose. Needless to say, we decided to skip an at-sea Passover seder this year. After my check-in on the Pacific Seafarers net at 6pm, we were really uncomfortable, and things were banging around and Tim was studying the growing confused seas and dark clouds as darkness set in. We decided that the best thing to do was to hove-to for the night. The weather picture looked good if we could continue North for another day or so, but we just didn't feel comfortably continuing through the night given the conditions. So we hove-to (meaning we set the sails and rudder to keep the boat pretty much stationary, with the seas just passing calmly under us -- for the most part). And it immediately felt good not to have the seas pounding over the bow, and washing down the deck into the cockpit. It's amazing the fixes Tim had already come up with to keep the cockpit dry! We decided to sleep through the night and make a decision after checking weather again in the AM. Which we did, and have been heading back south ever since... smooth sailing when we're going with the seas! We should be back to Oahu on Tuesday.
Happy Easter everybody!
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