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From Fiji to the Marshall Islands
🕑 Added 2018-11-15 20:31:29 +0000 UTC I know what you're thinking - we were supposed to sail to Tuvalu no? Well. Yes. We decided to skip it. We don't normally change routes like this. This is a first.This change added 1,200NM to our passage - a considerable amount.
SO why? Why do this to ourselves? Why spend more weeks at sea than we have to?
Because we enjoy it.
Spending time at sea gives us to think, to get perspective and to plan. There is no pressure to see anyone, or do anything. Life becomes simple again. All you have to do is go forward, to push through the waves.
More time out there doesn't come without difficulties though, it isn't paradise, and at times I wondered if we'd made the right decision in skipping Tuvalu but the wind at the time was good and we couldn't help ourselves. We think that the many days of calm preceding our arrival to Tuvalu may have had something to do with it. The wind kept teasing us, little puffs of air coming and going... giving us a preview of what could be.
"You want wind? Here you go woooOOOSH! Just KIDDING! It was a joke ha-ha there's no wind! Not now, not ever."
After 4 months of not moving and of doing short sails we were eager to be out there. Fuck calms, fuck land... GIVE US SOME OCEAN.
Yea. We wanted to stay on the ocean. Crazy, we know. As Robert Downing once wrote: "Our interest is on the dangerous edge of things." It really is. There are times we look at each other like, "the fuck we doing out here? This is insane." But moments after that, a flock of dolphins comes swimming at the bow, a bird comes swooping by, the clouds take impossibly beautiful shapes and colours... then everything is okay again and the bad and scary dissolve into nothing.
"What would you rather be doing?" we often ask each other, when one of us begins the 'this is crazy' speech. "Nothing else."
It took us 24 days to get to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. We are here, and we are happy, think we got the 'sailing' out of our system now.
Rekka will write a more detailed account of our passage on our blog, expect it in the next couple of days. Amazing to think that we are 1724NM closer to our goal, Japan is getting nearer...
Books read on passage:
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Don't sleep, there are snakes by Daniel L. Everett
Godforsaken sea by Derek Lundy
On Trails by Robert Moor
Seraffyn's Oriental Adventure by Lin Pardey
Aesop's fables
The sixth extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
We're looking forward to spending the next 2 months here in the Marshalls!
Rekka & Devine
SY Pino
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