Pitufa.at

The wind continues to be very light, last night the breeze died almost completely down… We’re now wistfully thinking back to the Med, when being becalmed meant sitting on a flat, mirrorlike sea. On an ocean there’s almost always swell and the waves take a long time to go down. Being becalmed here means rolling heavily with violently flapping sails. Therefore we turned the engine… Continue reading »

The wind has turned too northerly for our twin headsails (we can only go up to about 120 degrees to the wind with the twins up), so we spent an hour taking the poles down, changing the configuration and are now beamreaching with mainsail up again. Pitufa’s sloping, but this time to the portside–so sitting on the loo’s less adventurous and everything stays in the… Continue reading »

Shortly before we arrived on Isabela our friends on Spruce left towards the Marquesas. After our 3 weeks stay in the Galapagos we got ready to leave ourselves and I remember thinking ‘my God, we’ve spent ages on Isabela, did tons of thing and these poor people are still at sea…’. In the end it’s not as bad as expected. The days on a passage… Continue reading »

Yesterday we were both quite low on energy. Exhaustion seems to build up every day and the unsettled weather didn’t help, so we had a lazy day, doing nothing but napping and reading in the cockpit. When the wind shifted further east (as we had hoped for) we were able to rig the twin headsails and go downwind. Rigging the poles, adjusting all blocks, leading… Continue reading »

We’re not much into sailing, to be honest. We don’t enjoy living inside a tumbledryer, getting up every 4 hours to sit out in the cold, sometimes wet cockpit, looking out for hostile freighters eager to sink the boat or even more hostile clouds eager to blow her over. But we endure this to arrive with our cosy home in far-away places, have cat, kitchen,… Continue reading »

Today around noon we passed our half-distance mark. After a very comfy and quiet first half of the night we passed from dark cloud to dark cloud with gusty wind and drizzle. This morning the sea was high again and confused. It’s a scary view when an especially steep and high blue mountain looms up over Pitufa’s side. It seems certain that the wave will… Continue reading »

Food’s a central topic in the life on Pitufa anyway, but even more during passages. We have a hearty breakfast around 9, a muesli or a salad at noon (hooray, we finished the bananas today, eating about 100 bananas in one week was quite a challenge–who’d have thought that the whole bunch would get ripe so quickly?? we’ll keep away from bananas for a while… Continue reading »

After just a week we’ve almost made one third of the distance–only a bit more than the distance of our Atlantic crossing is missing, but while we had to hand-steer on the Atlantic, here we just watch our windvane Wayne Vaney do all the steering. We’ve had two rough days with lots of squalls and strong winds intercepted by annoying calms during which Pitufa rolls… Continue reading »

While cruising through the Med, crossing the Atlantic and cruising through the Caribbean we kept adding little improvements to make life on passage easier (locked floorboards, sliders to secure drawers, etc.), but most of our sailing until now was downwind, with Pitufa gliding down waves and rolling. On this passage we now have the wind on the beam, as soon as it picks up (like… Continue reading »

Once again the earth is a blue disk and the sky its blue lid. The perfect deep azure of the Pacific is only dotted with occasional whitecaps today, the wind is lighter and progress slower, but also more comfortable. Looking at the chart it seems incredible how far away and far apart islands are spreads on the gigantic width of the Pacific. We haven’t seen… Continue reading »

We’ve had a fresh breeze and more than 1 knot of current helping us along on the first day and Pitufa’s flying along with 7 to 8 knots and the wind on her beam. After last-minute shopping, clearing up the boat and preparing for the passage we were actually looking forward to some days of lazy reading on the passage but life on passage turned… Continue reading »