May 14 & 15

From Lynne

Cook's Petrel

I hope you appreciate the 2 or 3 hours I have spent trying to identify yesterday's bird.  I'm guessing Cook's Petrel because it flew fast, strong & zigzag like a bat. It was all dark from a distance, did not follow ships, not graceful and no loop d loops. However, the illustrations show white under the wings which we could not say. Or Hawaiian Petrel because the distribution map looks better but flight pattern not so much. For some of these open ocean species where no one ever is except us, how do they know?  I can tell you for sure there is no shipping or other traffic out here!  We think only three boats went to French Polynesia from California this year and we were one of them.

After careful consideration we have determined that we are not too old for this.  Yay! On the same subject, we are now wearing standard tropical cruising attire. Old, but suits us well. It is hot enough for fans.

Tuesday, May 15 0130.  Oh, dandy! That PSBL TROP CYCLONE/TD (tropical depression) we have been watching over to the East of us for 3 or 4 days,  now has a name!  Aletta was born in that huge pool of hot water West of Central America. We are in cold water, so by the time Aletta reaches us her energy will have been sucked out by the cold water. She is at 10d N moving W, we are at 15d N moving S but if we are fast enough and she is slow enough we won't collide. The weatherfax has turned itself on and in 3 minutes we'll have a sheet of paper with the tropical surface analysis in map form.  The inmarsat delivers the same thing in written form.  Plus the single side band can deliver animated forecasts with colors to our computer.
Another tropic bird today.  You should google Red-tailed Tropic Bird; it is really a beautiful bird! (a picture in previous post).  The first one was close enough to us that we could see the sun shining through the pure white feathers, the hard-to-see thin long tail and the black around the eye - stunning.

Every 10 min we check the radar and can confirm that there still ain't nobody out here but us 2 old chickens!

Barry is going to send an explanation of how Sailmail works but I read it and I don't understand it even though I know what he is talking about.  My explanation: Our computer is connected to a modem which is connected to our  SSB (single side band) radio (which is also a ham radio). The radio waves travel to a land station which turns it back into something a computer gets as email. We send our email to Sheryl who posts it to you - all using Sailmail.  You can write back to us at our email and she will condense it and send on to us.  So please write to us! She says her friends love the blog but so far, of our friends, only Diane and Mim have responded.  We need those XXX & OOOs from Felice!  And you, too.

14 May 2012 by Barry:  We are sending and receiving email from our children and a few other trusted businesses using a high frequency radio operating in the 5 to 23 MHz frequency band, depending on distance and time of day.  We compose the emails on our computer.  The computer is connected to a sophisticated modem which switches the phase of audio tones depending on whether the digital bit is a 1 or a 0.  A program on the computer controls the modem and radio.  We transmit a packet of information to a similar radio and modem connected to a computer shoreside somewhere.  The two radio/modem combinations exchange the necessary data with each other until they are done sending the emails to each other.  The amazing part of the modem involves error detecting methods to determine how much of the received data is error free, how much data needs to be resent, and telling the other modem which data to resend.  The system is amazingly robust in transferring the data perfectly even though the signal to noise ratios are not very high.  The shoreside facility is connected to a network of 20 similar facilities located around the world through the internet.  Any email to be sent to us over the radio is available at each facility. Once we receive the email from any facility, it is removed from the outbox of all of the facilities.  The shoreside facilities forward through the internet emails we send and similarly receive emails intended to be sent to us.  The software and methods were conceived by a small group of ham radio operators.  They have their own network of stations provided and maintained by volunteers.  Marine users do not need to be licensed hams.  Their cooperative association, Sailmail, is lead by one of the ham wizards and his wife who circumnavigated in their sailboat and a world-class sailboat racing navigator and his wife.  Their desire and need to communicate by email on the seas provided the impetus to find a solution.  Combine that with their technical abilities and organizational skills and we and other cruisers and long distance racers now have been provided this useful capability and service.

Sailmail Station Locations

We have to be very protective of our address to prevent it from being disclosed to spammers.  The bandwidth of our radio-based system is very limited and we can only transfer a small number of messages each day, including incoming weather information.    Our children forward to us only what we need to know.  But that is sufficient for our need and we are very grateful that this capability has been made available to us.  When we get shoreside again and can directly connect to the internet, we will review our regular email accounts to get up to date on all that you have sent to us.  So please keep us informed about what is going on in your lives that is important to you and makes your life special to us.

We have been crossing the trade winds for 3 full days and nights now.  The tradewinds blow continuously with little variation in velocity or direction throughout the day or from day to day.  The self-steering system on SUNRISE is set to have the boat sail a fixed angle to the wind.  So 24 hours a day for three days now, SUNRISE  has been going in a straight line.  Just like being on a straight railroad track to infinity.  Never even considered touching the sail trim or steering today.  And it may be like this for the next 4 days and nights.  It is a big ocean out here.  At 6 knots of boat speed, it is a huge ocean out here.  No, more than that.  Its HUMONGUS.  Never-the-less, we need to look around and check the radar every 10 minutes.  You only need to get run over by one ship to ruin the rest of your life. Yet despite all of our looking, there has been no sign of another vessel for a week now.  Ain't nobody here but us Chickens! In November, we will fly from New Zealand back to Los Angeles. Some people say that that 12 hour flight on a 747 is brutal, but to us, it is heavenly.

   
From Barry: 15 May 2012  To make sure we don't collide with the remnant of Aletta,  we have throttled up by unrolling the genoa headsail and adding an extra knot of boat speed.  That makes it noisier and jerkier for us and more strain on the boat and genoa, but we thought it the prudent thing to do.

Genoa Sail

 
The ocean must be more fertile here.  I removed 5 small squid and one flying fish from the deck this morning.  Marine road kill.  We have had as many bird sightings this morning as the previous few days combined. Lynne thinks petrels.


Position :  14 11.64' N, 130 05.64' W    
Speed : 7.4 knots,  Course : 199 degree