(Note: My son & I just completed delivering our Kelly Peterson 44 from New Zealand to California. This journal entry is from the American Samoa to Hawaii leg. He is a much better writer than I.)

We spent a few days provisioning, taking the local taxies to the foreign stores to take on supplies for our trip. The local busses are exciting affairs; pickup trucks of various sizes stripped of everything in back of the windshield and rebuilt with lumber into rectangular boxlike compartments lined with backed benches in the manner of school busses, the windows are sheets of Plexiglas that slide into a the side of the bus to be taken down. The outsides are painted with garish colors, adorned with flags of Western Samoa, American Samoa, and the United States, or pictures of Jesus, or American sports teams or whatever else came to mind and they had the paint for. The interiors are similar, being outfitted in the front above the driver with carpet, or plastic jewelry, or feather boas or other contrivances to make them festive, and festooned with a series of outsized speakers that pump out the island music which sounds like a Jack Johnson mariachi album in Samoan at max volume, making conversation nearly impossible. After several days we finally got our supplies, did what laundry we could, and sailed out of the dogleg harbor the evening of the 4th of September heading out into the ocean again.

Tame passes slowly during the uneventful parts of the passage, each day being so indistinct in variety as to be unidentifiable from the one previous, and that from the one before, yet events a week before seem like they took place an age ago.

Under way I have really learned to embrace eating food out of cans. Each individual food item looses its meaning as something we might see on a supermarket produce shelf and becomes a can. A stack of ripe red tomatoes, earthy beets, bags of beans or a paper wrapped package of fresh red hamburger all become small metal cylinders labeled on top in indelible marker so you can tell their contents while looking down on them where they lie in the hold. Recipes are no longer composed of ingredients but built by increments; sauce for spaghetti is one can tomatoes, one can mixed vegetables, and one can Vienna sausage. A light dinner is a can of peas and carrots with a can of tuna. Dessert is a can of peaches in syrup. Most of the stuff coming in cans all has the same taste, like spiced cardboard. Canned peaches and pears differentiated only by texture, canned soups by the variety of spices. Sometimes it's an adventure, but mostly is just another reinforcement of how unexciting this can be, along with the endless tom Clancy novels, the same CDs listened to 100 times, the slow rolling blue of the ocean's endless miles all blending together day in and day out. I try and remember an event as I'm relating it to Dan, about how I saw an albatross, big and brown and graceful coming across the waves, only to realize that I could not for sure tell if it happened that morning or two days before.

We only ran into one real squall on the way to Hawaii, but it came on suddenly, catching me off guard. I was on watch, the moon wasn't out and it was mostly overcast, big low rolling clouds whose presence you could feel more than see. The wind started increasing, and by the time I got on my life jacket and was clipped into the safety lines to go on deck it was more or less full on. I called up Dan for another set of hands then went out of the cockpit, cool rain stinging like needles on my bare back and the hot ocean spray dousing me at intervals as I worked the lines at the mast, mostly using one hand for the task while holding myself in place with the other. After a bit of a struggle, the main sail having gotten stuck from the pressure put on it by the increased winds, I got in the reefs we needed, then made my way back to the cockpit where Dan helped reef the jib. The squall was in force now, pushing us over to thirty degrees of heel, me on the high side of the boat, feet propped on what used to be a vertical surface, watching the compass slide 10, 15, 20 degrees off course as the bow slid down the backside of 12 foot waves, the thick cables of the rigging on the lee side hanging slack and swinging perceptibly while to windward they were so taunt you could almost hear them humming in the wind. Ominous creaking sounds as the boat settled to the new pressures could be heard over the slam and crash of waves breaking over the bow. It's always a little disconcerting when things start to get exciting, but then I remembered how we endured 8 days straight of this on the trip from New Zealand to American Samoa and relaxed a little, still fighting to keep my body from sliding down to the low side of the boat. After two hours the wind abated. Dan went back down below to get the rest of his sleep before he came on watch again, and I let out a little bit more sale to get our speed up, cautiously returning to the norm.

The passage to Hawaii would end up taking 29 days straight, all without once seeing land, though passing close several times. A major factor in this was the week we spent about 500-600nm (nautical miles) south of Kiritimati (pronounced 'Christmas') Island. We had fouled the prop and could not motor, and what winds we were getting came from exactly the direction we wanted to be going. Add to that the currents in the area, which were also coming from the direction we wanted to be going and we spend a better part of a week tacking all over the ocean, each day watching the miles to go decrease only slightly despite the boat covering hundreds of sea miles, our course on the plotter looking like the scribbles of a small child made out of boredom.

Sometime during this monotony we ended up passing a group of two islands separated by a reef. We tried to set ourselves up to go east of the group, but the wind and currents pushed us so that we would have to either go several dozen miles out of the way to the west or try and thread the needle through them. They were arranged so that as we approached from the south the east island could be passed to the west while keeping off the reef by going in a northerly direction, while the west island was to the north of the reef and would have to be passed by going on a north-east heading. We tried for the east passage, but again were frustrated by the wind, and ended up approaching during the night, our propeller still fouled, and a weather system moving through giving variable winds. The passage was wide, and we would come no closer than five miles on the chart if everything went well, but charts for this area have been known to be several miles off and we lacked radar to confirm what the chart said. The inconsistent winds combined with the strong currents of the shallow sea kept me on my toes, making constant course corrections in between standing vigil on deck, eyes straining into the moonless night to try and catch a glimpse of the thin white lines on the horizon that betray waves breaking on shallows or beach, ears listening for any steady thrum of rushing water carried across the surface to announce the same. As soon as we got close I caught a good strong whiff of rotting vegetation, seaweed, and copra that the islands give off, reminding me that even though I couldn't see them there really were islands out there in the night. Finally after several hours we got through, the winds held and before my watch was over we were hurrying north-east away from the strait.

We finally made it to Kiritimati Island, passing close to the west in the night, the island announcing its presence only by the faint lights of the harbor entrance barley visible over the horizon. The winds became much more favorable after that and the rest of the trip to HI was more or less uneventful.