Day 18 Pacific Passage

Date: Monday, April 30th, 2018 Time: 19:21 UTC Location: 04° 54.3′ S 133° 42.9’W COG: 220° T SOG: 5 knots 24 hour distance traveled: 113 nm Distance to the Marquesas: 453 nm
This is now officially Cameron’s and my longest ocean passage. When we crossed the Atlantic in 2002 we landed on day 17. In looking at our estimates, we should be making land fall on Friday afternoon if all goes to plan. That would make for a 22 day passage. If that does happen we will be very pleased. We had not expected it to go as fast as it has. For all our talk of Banyan being the slowest boat in the fleet, she has done very well in relation to the rest of our little company.
I laugh a little at this as I really shouldn’t make it a competition… but we are in second place! Considering that we were the very last of the four boats to leave Mexico and we have run our engine less than the others, we are pretty proud of our little Banyan. Let’s see if we can hold our place! SV Baloo is about 150 nm ahead of us and a larger boat while SV Caramba and SV Luminesce are close to each other and about 180nm behind.
This morning was a bit squall heavy but on the other side of it we are seeing good winds and while the seas sometimes produce a pretty big roll that requires you to hold on or go flying, in general the sea state is tolerable. The girls are doing their school work. I’ve been working with them on Latin for a couple months but just the other day we started French as well. I have never had formal French lessons (or Latin for that matter) but I’m doing my best to give them a base to work off of through the materials that I collected before we left. The base of Spanish that they already have will help them as well. Cameron has fed us yummy leftovers for lunch and is now puttering away at boat maintenance and preparing dinner. Cameron and I also took some time this morning to go over our landfall options; we’ll share more on that in the coming posts.
We have used 5 gallons of water per day (estimate) and we have gone through 30 gallons of diesel in total.
This is SV Banyan, clear.

4 comments

  1. Ralph Myers says:

    Congratulations on your amazing progress. Guess I didn’t realize you are part of a flotilla, but that’s terrific.

  2. Janis and Fred Blue says:

    Love reading of your life on the Banyon. A little friendly competition with the others keeps you on your toes no matter who wins. Hugs to all of you and prayers for continued safe sailing…..Love A Janis and U Fred (leaving off the Great A and Great U–too much info..lol)

  3. Karen says:

    Wow you are making really good time! Go Banyan! I love that you have been able to keep continuing these updates too despite the most of the computers being down for the count! 😀 Also I’m curious – saw this article this morning and wondered how much plastic/trash you were encountering out there or if you were well south of the most affected areas? https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/blogs/remember-kid-who-invented-way-clean-ocean-plastic-hes-back-and-its-happening. Maybe you can tell us in a later post 😀

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