Kinetic Vic-Maui Report 07-09

Kinetic friends:

We are still sailing in great conditions and have racked up our fifth consecutive twenty four hour daily run of over two hundred miles.  That's a record for Kinetic as far as we can recall. 

Our starboard watch is Peter, Adam, Sebastian and Graeme; our port watch is Greg, Bill, Gordon and Jeff; David floats across the two watches.  There is a fair amount of good-natured inter-watch rivalry. Topics include who sailed farther, which watch didn't do their chores, who cooked the best meal; the facts don't matter nearly as much as a good yarn.  Teamwork is very much in evidence, with tasks such as sail changes that once occupied the full crew now often done with just one watch.

Some of you may be wondering what teenage boys are like, onboard the boat, a long way from home and appointed with responsibilities.  Well, they are like ... teenage boys!  Life on board with a group of people living in a small space is necessarily somewhat structured, with scheduled watches and meals, a duty roster for chores such as cleaning the toilet daily, and having to continually find and stow things in their proper places.  The teens have been doing very well at adapting to this.  They realize that mere words in an email are not likely to be credible evidence of such reformation, and in any event, they are guarded about raising expectations for their future lives ashore.  That said, they have been documenting with video their participation in feats of domestic duty.  Just in case. 

Out in the middle of the ocean, we've crossed paths with two large freighters.  One, we altered course to pass less than a mile astern of, and the other crossed three miles ahead of us.  Neither ship responded to hails on the radio, despite a legal obligation to maintain a lookout including an effective radio watch.  Did they even realize that we where there?  We track large ships on radar to confirm our relative tracks, making no assumptions about the other vessels. 

We are closing in on the halfway mark, in distance.  Touch wood, we seem to have made it most of the way around the North Pacific High, and are now lining up for our eventual path through the trade winds to landfall in Hawaii. 

The messages and emails from shore are making it to Kinetic, and the electronic "mail bag" is one of the highlights of each day.  Thank you all.  

Until tomorrow,

Kinetic.

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