Urios sailed west from the Galapagos on a cloudy windy Sunday afternoon with tanks full of fuel, gallons of drinking water and a ballast of canned food. It was the Vernal Equinox, March 21, 2004, 1:00pm. That’s where we made our first mark on the navigational chart as well as began the countdown to landfall. Given the distance that we were going to cover and the scale, our entire trip didn’t fit on one chart. It would be at least two weeks between our last mark on the Galapagos chart and when we showed up on the chart of French Polynesia.

How long would it would take us to travel the 2,958 miles across the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas? We had no idea. Depending on how well our navigation strategy panned out (we chose to sail in as straight a line as possible to the Marquesas and put our faith in the Tradewinds rather than sail out of the way to find more wind), it could either be Easter (April 11) or Memorial Day (May 31) or anytime in between! Hiva Oa was definitely just an exotic name and faraway place at this point.

So began our adventure. It was both a uniquely bonding experience with the guys as well as an individual and solitary one for me. In terms of our communal existence, we quickly got comfortable with having two other people always around whether we were brushing our teeth or eating. There are many horror stories of crews that don’t get along and captains that are dreadful so I count myself lucky that we became good friends and gelled as crewmates. Three thousand miles is a long way and we co-existed in a space that was the size of a bedroom, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for weeks. Our routine revolved around your turn for Watches, Doing the Dishes, and Cooking with reading, napping, Uno games, Movie Nights, boat maintenance, chess, and housekeeping in between. It was actually pretty normal daily life as far as all that goes, except that you’re confined to a boat that’s in constant motion.

Everyday life stuff like washing dishes and taking showers take on a whole new meaning at sea. They become events. Ever since my “Bucket Incident,” I have not been shy in enlisting the services of one of the guys to assist in the water retrieval portion of the salt water shower. I can also usually sway them into pouring water on me while they’re at it. When you close your eyes it’s almost like being at home... except of course for the unpleasant taste of the sea and salt water in your eyes. Doing the dishes in the cockpit is as much of a pain as you can imagine. Getting through your Dishes Day was such a joy because you knew that it’d be another 2 days of NOT having to do the dishes. Buckets and water retrieval, sloshing water and a moving boat, no suds and last night’s pasta sauce... The only time to you get jealous of other sailboats is when you see dishwashers and washing machines and watermakers on board!

The solitary part of our existence took over when darkness rolled around each night. Come 8pm, the first watch began. Within minutes everyone else would be in bed knowing that someone would be tapping your shoulder, shaking your foot, or shining a flashlight in your face all too soon! Suddenly you’re all by yourself in the dark with only the sound of the wind and waves and the humming of the auto-pilot. Three hours of solitude. Usually they can be pretty uneventful, which is great for the boys. They’ve mastered the skill of napping when it’s their turn so that they only wake up every half hour to scan the horizon for boats or squalls, or know when something is flapping or banging on the boat when it shouldn’t be. Me? I haven’t gotten there yet in terms of comfort with being responsible for the boat (or confidence that I’d wake up at all from my nap) so instead, I stay awake for all three hours, making sure the wind direction/speed gauge and boat are doing what it’s supposed to, and watching the miles and minutes tick by. It’s a great time to think and enjoy the moon and the stars, the sound of the waves and the cool breeze in your face. You really have time for yourself and when you get shooting stars instead of stormy skies, you couldn’t be in a better place. But, I must admit that sometimes night watch is just too painfully long when all you want to do is sleep.

The play-by-play:

Day 2
Another hot and sunny day. Ugh, way too hot and way too bright. I’m down below again, hiding from the sun. I finished my book. There are no fish on the line. Okay, I’m officially bored. Uh oh. I’d better come up with a better plan to entertain myself... there are 2,500 miles to go!

Day 4
There are dead calamaris/squid and flying fish strewn on deck. Do squid fly? We’ve heard that flying fish are good eating but of course the ones that choose to die on our decks are only about 2 inches long... A big one landed on Martial the other night as he napped in the cockpit, and he chucked it back into the ocean in a flash. I guess he wasn’t thinking about dinner when he was rudely awakened by a flapping fishtail.

We knew we’d hit patches of light wind and we did today. Time for the spinnaker... what a fun and beautiful sail. The huge piece of fabric harnesses the lightest of winds to make the boat fly! I had a blast setting the sail up and watching it fill with air – WHOOSH! Driving with the spinnaker was a new and exciting skill to try and master, which kept me entertained for a few hours.

What a night watch! I was sitting in the cockpit, staring off into space when I heard a whoosh! I peeked over the side to see a dolphin swimming alongside the boat, glowing in the phosphorescence. Ahhh... dolphins at night are my favorite things, and it was just about to get better! I looked around and there must have been 50-60 glowing dolphins coming at us from all sides, torpedoing through the black water. It was such a fantastic spectacle of glow-in-the-dark missiles and their luminous green jetstreams in the water as far as I could see… The Matrix movie posters had come to life! Unreal. The dolphins stayed and played for over an hour and my three hours on duty have never gone by so quickly.

Day 5
The wind has completely left us and we are literally floating in the ocean. Bang bang, bang bang. Since we have no wind, every ripple from the swell rocks the boat which in turns slams the rigging. I’m amazed at the unnerving noise the battens in the mainsail make as they pop from one side to the other. It’s so loud and a little distressing to listen to. Poor Urios!

It’s a running joke on the boat that I am always napping. I always protest loudly... but I think they might be right! Two two hour naps today and I’m still tired.

Martial spent the afternoon out in the cockpit with the short wave radio again, fiddling with the antenna and trying hard to get reception. We need some news! I've felt like I've been in a bubble since I left - I have no idea what's been going on in the world, and I know there's been a lot going on! Sometimes when you get the antenna at just the right angle on the metal stanchion the annoying fuzz goes away and you can actually hear a radio station. Sometimes it's religious choir music in French, Vietnamese or Chinese talk radio, or German news updates. If I'm really lucky, I can get Voice of America loud and clear for about 10 minutes. What I would do for some CNN!! We do get a couple of messages via SMS on the Iridium satellite phone every so often from friends and family with news updates (and what's happening on Alias!). All of us perk up when we hear the handset beep "new message." Of course it's usually Martial's friend from Paris with the latest French league football (soccer) scores results. Important stuff when you're sailing around the world!

Day 7
We tossed the last rotting carrot and wormy grapefruit over the side of the boat. Sadly, this was the last of our fresh food. From here on out it everything we would eat would come out of a plastic bag or tin can until we got to the other side (unless of course my fishing skills picked up!). When you rely on a combination of solar panels, windmills, generators, diesel engines and fuel for electricity, you learn quickly that electricity is a luxury. The fridge was an indulgence for such a long stint at sea so our massive bags of fresh vegetables and fruit from Panama only lasted two weeks. Nothing is safe from the salty sea air, humidity and heat. The moment the sun goes down, the cockpit becomes drenched in dew and nothing is ever really dry on board. Rust devours everything from utensils to zippers and I have never seen mold attack shoes and vegetables like that before!

My French lessons are slowly progressing. I’m now working on conjugating the “verbs of the first group” in my little notebook, though I still don’t know enough vocabulary to make very interesting or relevant sentences. Gregory wants to go to business school next year so he spends each morning doing practice GMAT questions. Brings back my own memories of Data Sufficiency problems and random Reading Comprehension topics. Martial has been reading “The Goal” (a typical business school book) for fun. Must be the supply chain consultant in him getting ready to go back to the real world. What a funny sight we must have been... I thought we were on vacation!

Fifteen degrees of longitude have passed so it’s time to change the clocks. Time is irrelevant to some degree out here, but we set our watches back an hour anyways.

Day 9
“What’s beneath us?” Gregory asked that random question this afternoon over a game of chess and I didn’t know if it was a trick question or the entrée to a funny joke. “Water. Duh.” “Yeah, but do you realize that we are on top of 4,000 meters of it?!” Reality shock. I had never really thought of how far the bucket I lost had fallen to the bottom of the sea. The magnitude of it all was kind of wild to ponder. When you look into the deep blue of the ocean, you really do see an endless deep blue. So much water, and so many shades of blue. It can be electric blue, dark blue, indigo blue, pale blue, greyish blue, greenish blue, but the ocean is also sometimes black, red, green, grey, opalescent, or even white.

The magnitude of it all became even more surreal when we finally hit the 1,500 mile/halfway mark this afternoon. We were the farthest we could ever be from two pieces of land/continents at this point (except maybe for somewhere between Cape Horn and Hobart, Australia). Crazy to imagine. And, you could barely even call the Galapagos and Marquesas land masses – they’re just tiny blips of islands in the middle of the vast ocean. We were definitely in the middle of nowhere!

Day 10
Charlie the auto-pilot stopped working last night. Martial was on watch and suddenly we weren’t headed where we were supposed to. So began a very long night. Things inevitably break down or stop working or leak on a boat, no matter how new the equipment or how well it worked before. It’s a fact of sailing life. I was just about to start convincing myself that hand-steering a boat 8 hours a day for 30 days wouldn’t be THAT bad when the old backup auto-pilot system stopped working too. But, boat owners become amazing fix it people... You have to, regardless that you may never have changed an oil filter before in your life or known how a water pump worked. It was music to my ears to hear an “Ah ha!” from Gregory who had been contorted into the deepest darkest recesses of the boat all morning with his flashlight and toolbox. It was just a fuse problem. What a relief!

Being the non-mechanical person that I am, I am utterly impressed with Gregory’s ability to troubleshoot and figure out the source of a problem is and how to fix it, whether it be electricity, engines or leaks. He says it’s just logic but I don’t know that I could ever be that resourceful or clever. I just stand by and watch in awe as he and Martial dive deep into the lockers and cabins of the boat with a voltage meter to figure out why the windmill was generating rust on the hull instead of amps for the battery. Or when Gregory has to taste the bilge water to see if it’s salty or not (the first indication of how big a deal the water in the bilge is) before he starts tracing and testing valves to fix a bad connection in an engine cooling pipe. Or when he starts working on the diesel engine, such a big hulking loud piece of steel. Gregory became a miracle worker in my book when he fixed the alternator in the middle of the ocean. We weren’t going to run out of electricity! And again when he figured out how to get the engine going again when it wouldn’t start. We weren’t going to be completely screwed! Things could have been bad/tougher for us if he hadn’t figured it out, especially as we were in the middle of nowhere. Here’s to logical thinking, intellect, and knack for mechanics, and of course, my morale support!

Day 12
We’ve had nothing but clouds and grey skies for four straight days. Where has the sun gone?

Swell, current, waves and wind are all signals to watch out for at sea, but I learned quickly that clouds are probably the most revealing. Their shape, size, speed, position give can foretell conditions amazingly well. Good sailors are great at reading the clouds, but I’d been watching the clouds for days and all I figured out were that the black ones were bad. Night rolled around and it was my turn up first on watch so of course the clouds got darker and the wind picked up. The guys were both sound asleep and I got treated to enormous looming pitch black clouds that wouldn’t go away, wind gusts up to 30 knots, pelting rain, and big banging waves. Memories of the rough weather in Caribbean Sea quickly flashed in front of me as Urios surfed waves and heeled with the gusts. It really probably wasn’t as bad as I thought, but as I was standing in the companionway, wet, hiding from the rain, alone, in the dark, miserable, and gripping the handles, I knew that this sucked and tonight’s watch would go down as the worse night watch ever!

Day 13
I woke up from my morning nap to see Martial in the galley up to his elbows in flour and dough. Cooking Day responsibilities were obviously motivating more inventive cooking, or else we had exhausted all the typical menus and canned food combinations. His homemade French onion tarte was a gastronomic treat for lunch and it was delicious! I don’t know if he does this at home, but I guess having lots of time and bored tastebuds can inspire even the least capable of chefs. It’s all about spices, creativity and taking risks when you have limited ingredients. Some work, some don’t. My mushroom pasta was OK, my shrimp chow mein was an absolute disaster, though I redeemed myself with some awesome gazpacho whipped up from soup mix. Gregory managed to create delicious “steak” and potato pancakes from mashed potato mix and a can of corned beef as well a tasty dessert of dried fruit and couscous. Martial’s garlic pasta was a homerun, and of course the onion tarte. He tried to eke out baguettes for tea time with the leftover dough, but there was a slight miscalculation of yeast in his recipe and they came out like hockey sticks. There would be no eating them in the way they were intended (warm and toasted with jam), but the beauty of it all is that in their last iteration, they were wonderful croutons (in soup) for dinner. Resourcefulness at its finest!

The other big event of the day? I launched another message in the bottle into the ocean. I realize that the chances of it being found are slim, but the concept of it is still compelling. You never know…

Day 14
Rain! Ahhhhhh. We all hurried outside when the downpour really began. A fresh water shower would be the ultimate luxury! We set buckets all around the cockpit to catch water, the shampoo bottle was out, and we were poised and ready. The biggest buzzkill is always when you’re all sudsed up and the rain stops. But not today! The rain poured down, and not only did we all get a good long cold rinse, Martial eked out a load of laundry, and we were all treated to a bright full rainbow on the horizon!

The GPS budged! It finally clicked to 999.8 miles to go. A milestone! It feels like we’re finally getting there...

There are hundreds of sailing superstitions like not saying the French word for “rabbit” or “rope,” or leaving on a journey on a Friday, both of which we really adhere to. One of the taboos on Urios was asking “when are we going to get there?” The reason being you never know what could happen out there and you don’t want to jinx yourself by making a prediction. It was Day 14, and we all couldn’t help but think to ourselves that if we kept up with the current pace, we’d make it to the Marquesas in less than three weeks – a pretty speedy crossing, and just in time for Easter and Gregory’s 30th birthday. Inch’ Allah. I know we were all hoping for it – it’d be much more fun to be celebrating all of it with COLD champagne and FRESH food!

Day 15
Still no fish.

Day 16
It’s a bright big full moon tonight and it could have been daytime. I wrote in my journal by the light of the moon. I also saw the sun rise, moon set, sun set and moon rise. Pretty cool for 24 hours!

Day 18
Time change again. Another 15 longitudinal degrees gone by.

I spent the afternoon sewing. Urios’ French flag was destroyed by the wind during the 50+knot storms they got on the Atlantic crossing. The flag was in shreds and threadbare with barely 2/3 of it left on the pole. Lots of stitches and lots of creative patching later we finally had a proper French flag. A French boat can’t rightly arrive in French Polynesia without one!

Day 19
I officially lost the Pacific Crossing Uno marathon. The hours we spent playing Uno will be one of the best memories of the crossing. So competitive and just too fun because of it. I would never have imagined how much we all got into it! We certainly figured out who is a grumpy loser too. 176 hands later, my 1,000+ point deficit means the first round of drinks is on me.

240pm. LAND SIGHTING!! There’s just the faintest shadow of an island in the distance… We’re so close, but yet so far. Just 31 miles to go but the wind has suddenly disappeared. Bang bang, bang bang goes the rigging. At this rate, we won’t arrive until the early hours of the morning.

Everything happens for a reason though. Had we gone any faster we would have missed the most glorious sunset I have ever seen. The sky turned such a magnificent myriad of colors... It started off as a golden yellow with rays of light streaming onto the ocean through the clouds. Then it turned bright orange with pink streaks covering the entire horizon. Then the clouds turned bright hot pink as the skies turned dark blue. Then the sky became striped with deep oranges and magentas. The whole time the ocean was mimicking the colors of the sky. The water would be a deep grayish blue off the back, shimmering pink in the front of the boat, bright blue on starboard, and golden orange off the port side at any given moment. Magical! Just when I thought I’d captured the most beautiful moment of the sunset and put my camera away, I’d have to run down to get it all out again when an even better Kodak moment appeared. I must have gotten my camera out and put it away at least 6 times in those 2 hours.

It’s our last day of the crossing and our last night of watches. It’s going to be so nice to have a full night’s sleep again! I can’t believe how speedy we were and how quickly (now) it seems to have gone by. Nineteen days is a long time and I think we’re all ready to get there, but a part of me wishes we had a few more days on board together. As strange as that sounds, it might be a long time before I’m on a sailboat sailing across an ocean with such great fun people again...

Day 19.5
I came out of the cockpit at 5am and the faint shadow that was on the horizon last night was now a big looming mass right in front of us. By moonlight, the island was just an amorphous mountain of rock. As the sun rose, it was as if it was wiping a dirty window clean… We could see more and more detail every passing minute. The sunlight exposed tiny villages and houses, roads and coconut trees, cliffs and mountaintops. The island was absolutely breathtaking. We had definitely arrived in paradise!

We passed the green buoys at the entrance to the harbor at 735am, and with that, our journey across the Pacific Ocean had officially ended. Woohooo!!! 755am and Urios was anchored in the bay and for the first time in almost 20 days, we weren't moving. We were elated, but I don't know that the reality of what we'd done had sunk in yet. We were just happy to be still and listening to the sound of ukeleles on Radio Polynesia.

When we finally shook ourselves from our tired stupor, we posed for a commemorative self-timer Crossing/Arrival photo, got the dinghy inflated, and were all finally ready to step off the boat... Except that I couldn’t remember where I put my shoes. I’d been barefoot for 20 days straight. Imagine that.

I won’t miss salty skin or being awoken in the middle of the night every night or the taste of plastic water. I will miss the camaraderie of being part of a crew on a big journey and the feeling of having all the time in the world. It's a lifestyle where all that matters is where you are and what you are doing right now. Now that’s a place to get to!

A quick summary:
2,958 miles
19 days, 22 hours
17 meals involving a canned fish
20 meals involving a canned vegetable
27 night watches
176 hands of Uno
0 fish