After the storms of the first week, the second week was pretty boring. We continued to sail more easterly than we wanted in order to avoid low pressure systems. We thought we’d turn north once we crossed 160*E, but a big low kept us going east some more. The net effect of all this travel east is that we’ve added miles to the trip. The shortest distance between two points on a sphere is a great circle route. From Japan the great circle route would have taken us north of the Aleutians and then south again to Seattle. As we’ve traveled due east we have traveled greater distance to get home. Our total miles currently stand at 4700, up from 4300 when we left. Our shortest distance to Seattle right now is still to head north, but not nearly as far as the Gulf of Alaska. We should hit our halfway point in another 500 miles or so. This will also put us on the edge of the stationary North Pacific high. Once there we simply sail over the top of it and then home. Sounds simple. We’ll see.
The other big news actually belonged to our third week, but we’ll cover it here. Teresa reported the incident with the tanker in a previous blog. We have reported the incident to the US Coast Guard in Hawaii since the PacSea Net reported it to them already. We received a very nice email back from the US Coast Guard Joint Rescue Coordination Center stating that they were passing the report on to their Investigative Unit. We just want the incident on record in case this tanker is involved in similar incidents in the future. I can think of no innocent explanation for the convoluted course changes of this commercial ship. Actually, we’d really like to know what was happening on the tanker’s bridge, but I fear we’ll never find out. What were they doing with the first pass and whistle blast? Why did they turn back toward us? Were they monitoring the PacSea net and broke off after they were publicly identified? Even though Teresa posted about the ‘psycho tanker’, we continue to get email asking about the incident so I will post our report to the Coast Guard.
One last item. You may have noticed that our blog posts used to identify the author to the left of the posting. This is done by email address, Teresa’s come in via sailmail and mine come in via my HAM call sign on Winlink. The software identifies the poster by the email address. Unfortunately there are no HAM winlink stations within range of the North Pacific so all our postings come through sailmail. I’ll sign the bottom but until we have an internet connection to fix it, the blogging software will identify all posts as from Teresa.
Today on Yohelah we’re still nervous about psycho tankers…
Rob
