Our journey south towards Tahiti has started off far less sporty and splashy than our departure from Oahu. However, less wind has converted the cabin to a sauna with the sweet pungency of fruit beginning to rot with a mixture of body odors and a dash of salt. To add to the sweatbox, we have recently opened for business as the worlds best floating bakery with five star views of the middle of the pacific. We are pumping out the best baked goods for thousands of miles with an average of two tasty treats a day. Some honorable mentions include brownies, lemon tart, tropical loaf, blueberry muffins, Italian herb bread and chocolate chip cookies among others. Tonights speciality is a spiced pear upside down cake.
While most people would dread getting up to work a graveyard shift, being on watch in the middle of the night is definitely our favorite time to be on deck. At night, we have brief respite from the scorching equatorial sun and are treated with special nights of sailing upwind under the milky way. Imagine being at the helm with a spoonful of Nutella while up above the sky is illuminated with hundreds of stars and down below the ocean is shimmering down with bioluminescence and a pod of dolphins is riding the wake of the bow. It doesn’t get much better than that. The past few nights we have also had spectacular moon rises with a bright red moon breaking from the horizon, almost like a bonus sunset. At 3:40 in the morning on Friday the crew got up for a special celebration. It was time for us to relinquish our titles of pollywogs and be sworn in as trusty shellbacks as we sailed across the equator. Traditionally, line crossing ceremonies have included grim hazing rituals, so we opted for a more wholesome celebration. We prepared our tribute to Neptune and entered the southern hemisphere in style with a brief disco party on deck.
Monday morning, and a smelly surprise was discovered – another clog in the starboard head. What a treat to take apart this head twice in one week! To spare you the graphic details of the several hour repair and cleanup process as it is not for the faint hearted and weak stomached, I’ll skip to the good part: it was the perfect day for a swim in the middle of the ocean. The wind dropped to less than 2 knots true and the glassy blue water was ever so inviting after hours of being covered in unspeakable sludge. After our cleansing dip, we enjoyed antioxidant packed ice lollies on deck, forgetting the traumas of earlier in the day. No day is the same on the ocean, but today was quite a special one.
In more good news, we are officially over halfway to Tahiti! As excited as we are to arrive at our destination, it is bittersweet to realize landfall also means the closure of the bakery and an end to midnight dance parties under the stars.
– Nicole