Boat status, WorldClinic, BlueCosmo

Written on August 11th

Day: 50 - Odometer: about 1,785M
Position: N25d01’ W145d08’
Distance from start: 1,445M
Nearest land: Point Kumuhaki 632M due 240T
Waikiki Yacht Club by my course: 741M due WSW
ETA: last few days of August

RECORDS as running totals
Solo career total in days at launch: 845 now 895
Overall career total in days at launch: 928 now 978
Solo career total in miles at launch: 27,595M now about 29,380M
Overall career total in miles at launch: 31,083M now about 32,868M
==> Ralph Tuijn (NL) leads the last one with 35,635M

Actual distance rowed in miles until Waikiki will append to my existing career totals at launch in solo and overall categories, respectively. To become official, London based Ocean Rowing Society must adjudicate supporting GPX files from my chart plotter and YB Tracker.

—-oOo—-

The post tropical remnant lows Hilda and Jimena ran out of steam by the weekend and the sea state around me proved to be benign on Saturday unlike what we had imagined. The storm avoidance strategy to stay around 25N had served me well. I carried on…

Then Tropical Storm Kevin was named on Sunday south of Baja. It would advance due WNW while decreasing in strength. West was good as a course for me to maintain. TS Linda is following close on Kevin’s heels which became a hurricane and will cause more disruption in my winds. We are carefully monitoring.

I am grateful for the initial setup and ongoing support that my friend Jonathan Saad at BlueCosmo Satellite Communications has provided. With a reliable communication system on my vessel, I am able to receive information and observe wind patterns, allowing me to make informed decisions about which direction to invest my sweat equity.

I want to stop at Waikiki to address a few fixes on the rowboat. I will also take advantage of the stopover to attempt yet another try at obtaining a visa to China. I was denied in March due to the pandemic, told to reapply when their San Francisco visa office reopened and have not been offered an exception since then despite various high level attempts. As of today, their visa offices in California are still closed. This is not looking promising.

I have been trying to convey that (a) I am vaccinated, (b) I will have spent months alone on my rowboat in perfect quarantine conditions from mid September until my landfall in March and (c) I am willing on arrival to stay at anchor under a yellow flag (letter Q) to comply with any specific quarantine requirements that they may impose on all arriving vessels. (C) has been the international maritime standard for a long time.

I hear that currently the SARS-2 Delta variant is causing consternation globally. I will gather as much information as I can about this while at Waikiki and consult with my medical sponsor WorldClinic. Dr. Daniel Carlin at WorldClinic has been a steady supporter of my expeditions since 2007. They are a concierge provider of remote medical services to those who at times will not have access to traditional healthcare. They issued me a personal medical kit, the contents of which we adjust to suit each phase of my expeditions. I have been briefed before my launch and have access to their Care Team 24/7 by satellite phone or messages. They can advise and/or instruct me to take prescription strength medications from the kit should I alert them to a health problem then remain my primary care givers until I reach civilization.

I have yet to have any serious health concerns on this crossing. From my launch until the latitude of Pt Conception while along the coast, every little itch inside my nose or a mild tickle in my windpipe got my attention. Although I had completed the Moderna vaccination series, I was super attentive during the first two weeks. After that, the probability that any other communicable illness would manifest itself went down considerably.

If I have to list minor issues so far, I had some blisters earlier in my overworked right hand. Now that I am surrounded by relatively warm 75F (24C) waters and the sun can be hot when clouds part, I began rowing bare bottoms. This means sweating inside the nook of my knees; salt in my sweat cooks that tender skin over time, causing tiny blisters which itch. If I scratch, the skin breaks, itching even more with salt. The only way to address this is rinsing regularly with fresh water and applying cream to the blistered area. Similarly, I must rinse my rowing seat often; dilute, dilute, dilute…

I have also shed a layer of skin on the soles of my feet which have not experienced the usual pressure inducing activities like standing, walking or running since my launch; I no longer needed the thicker skin there. My deck has a sandpaper like coarse feel underfoot because the deck paint had an abrasive additive to create a nonslip surface. Typically wet and softened dead skin on the soles of my feet did not last long on that textured finish.

The first canister of butane for my stove lasted from launch in June 22 until July 15th. That was just over three weeks! The second canister lasted 15 days till the 30th. My previous experience was 11-15 days per canister so I may have slightly overstocked on fuel. This may be partly because I am eating more cereal requiring simply cold water. Hot breakfast options require me to boil water. One could always soak freeze dried meals in cold water, taking a bit longer to rid the crunch in the food; some rowers choose to do just that to save space and weight. I prefer hot meals obviously…

I use MCT Oil powder instead of milk powder in my coffee and cereal. It gives me that extra bit of fat which I otherwise lack in the carbohydrate rich freeze-dried meals.

As for the rowboat, the major fixes that I plan are:

1- There is still air getting in the watermaker system which I will attempt to fix once and for all by bringing the device intake below water level. I will discuss this in another update maybe while I fix it. In Waikiki, I can embellish my update with pictures. With proper TLC, I am still making two gallons of water just fine every day but that requires me to sit by the watermaker to keep an eye on the amount of air leaking into the prefilter. I then need to stop the watermaker to prime the system for every gallon of potable water that I produce; not good.

2- The scuppers on the edge of the deck are falling apart with slamming waves on my starboard side. These one way flaps keep waves from washing the deck but allow water on deck to drain. They are thin plastic relying on their flexing to work and must have gone brittle in the time that my rowboat sat idle since 2012. I will make new rigid ones using fiberglass, then paint and install them using hinges which will be durable. Thin bungees on deck will keep them closed but will stretch to let water out.

3- I may devise a lee-cloth mid cabin for resting comfort. I will discuss this later.

4- I will receive the correct size charger for my BGAN Explorer 510 high bandwidth satellite modem. I was shipped the wrong size before I launched. Until Waikiki, I thought maybe I could “McGyver” an adapter to bridge the gap between the device socket and the wrong size plug, alas never did. This is one reason why I am not sharing images.

5- Although waterproof, my main Garmin chart plotter is mounted inside the cabin for protection from the elements. It has a built in WiFi system which allows me to use a smartphone or an iPad on deck to view and control it. This WiFi connection failed after a couple days and didn’t come back. We went through a few settings with Garmin tech support, each buying me another few days before failing again. We are out of options. At the same time, I have enough redundant navigation methods on deck that I will pull into Waikiki just fine.

The most recent problem with this device is how flaky its odometer became. So I measured straight line distances between sunset positions since June 22 and put them in a spreadsheet to obtain a running total to approximate my trip odometer. You have that number above; the device says I am at 1,432 nautical miles, which is wrong. From the same spreadsheet, I am using a seven day speed average to calculate an ETA to Waikiki. One spreadsheet to add back and to estimate forward…

My options were to buy a new chart plotter, or to figure out with tech support the software updates required to make my discontinued older model work with the new fancy smartphone App, or to mount the old plotter outside on deck for access while rowing. When rewiring the rowboat with Brian Johnson, we had the foresight to bring wires outside for just this sort of scenario.

Redundancy was our goal. I have a Garmin Montana that will run and display the same electronic charts, also the Navionics App on my smartphone both of which give me options on deck. We installed a mount and a power source for the Montana and a waterproof magnetic charger that will clamp the smartphone on the bulkhead within my sight.

We shipped a newer model of my chart plotter already to Waikiki which I will install inside. If I can sort the software issue with the old chart plotter, it may sit outside to give me the largest display option, else I will pitch it. This is a wet boat. Splashing water on the touchscreen of the device makes it mistake droplets running across the screen as my fingertips. To address that, I can lock the touchscreen. I should also modify its plastic cover; cut a window in the cover the size of its display then place non-reflective framing glass there, bedding it on with some 5200 sealant. It should be the perfect shield against random sea splash on the display.

The WiFi issue also didn’t show up until a few days after launch when the connection started dropping. It was behaving like a software memory leak, failing after a set period of operating time. I had made sure to update the firmware on all devices during the last week before launch. Of course the prelaunch testing with my new dedicated smartphone for a short while did not identify this issue either.

In both cases, a week long shakedown cruise around Puget Sound living on the rowboat pretending to be on the ocean, would have ferreted out said issues, but I simply didn’t have the time. Frankly I have never done such a shakedown before either. This teaches a new lesson to an old dog I suppose…

My intention was to do a nonstop crossing from North America to Asia which is why I launched later in June to allow typhoons to run their course in the western Pacific through November and December. However this later launch necessarily increased my hurricane risk until Hawaii. On a normal summer with a proper visa in hand, I would have passed nonstop north of Hawaii to reduce that risk. My course instead was being dragged south by this summer’s unduly aggressive northerly trend in the winds earlier on my course. Thankfully I am making up now by advancing west, but all this has delayed my landfall.

Now that I should stop at Waikiki to resolve aforementioned items, let’s hope that my earlier insistence on a nonstop crossing doesn’t come back to bite me. Hindsight is 20/20. An earlier launch with a month or two of pause at Waikiki to relaunch in September would have been wiser and less risky overall.

Assuming Linda will not derail my final approach, the question for the rest of August is where the next storm, Marty is lurking with its “1.21 Gigawatts of power.”

Erden.