Ship’s Journal from Mallorca to Fiji

Update 15/04/25 1200hr (GMT-8) somewhere between the Galapagos and Marquesas Islands.

We were well beyond the halfway point when we finally had our halfway party. Surely that’s a sign that our days are filled with things to do. The kids are doing very well with their schoolwork. The reward will be an Easter holiday (the week after) in the Marquesas. There should be wild horses in the forests, so Charlie’s interest is piqued! Sara seems to be handling her nausea a bit better, although it always lurks around the corner. She sits on deck with her laptop for a few hours every day. 

Meanwhile An manages to find moments in between homeschooling, watchkeeping, and cooking to work on the marketing of her online course, Your Natural Birth. She has several births planned for July, August, and September, where her guidance as a doula will make an invaluable difference. Jan has pretty much become Ocean’s private tutor. He’s also secured a summer job in a bar in Antwerp already. Who knows what their next adventure will be after that!? I’m following up on existing Invisible Crew clients, signed up a new one last week, and hopefully will have another new one secured by the end of the week. Meanwhile, we’re finalizing the May/June issue of The Islander Magazine with new exciting contributors, including an article from the Kaminando people, whom we met in San Blas, working on the plastic pollution issue.

The fact that we can do all of this from our little travelling island fills me with pride and actually blows my mind! Despite being a nostalgic, romantic kind of guy, we can only be grateful for the modern-day technology that not only contributes to the safety of an expedition like this but also enables people to go on these kinds of adventures before retiring. (Just as well, because retirement is a flawed concept anyway.)

And of course, navigation is part of our day-to-day life. But on this vast ocean with steady winds, it’s almost secondary… as long as the autopilot continues to work! There’s no indication it will stop; I’m just expressing my gratitude!

Despite really missing our Code Zero (and Häagen-Dazs Macadamia Brittle—sorry, I digress), we are making good time under mainsail and genoa. However, we need more than 15 knots to do so. The wind has been coming from an east-south easterly direction, which gives us a wind angle of about 120°-150°, almost but not quite from behind. This is awkward because our genoa easily gets covered by the mainsail and then collapses. The Code Zero would perform very well at this angle. If we luff up to take the wind more from the side of the boat, the waves also come in from the side and make the boat roll. When the boat rolls, the wind isn’t strong enough to keep the mainsail in its place. It collapses and then falls back onto the rigging, which is always far aft on a catamaran. So the art is to keep the sail opened up enough to catch the wind and closed enough not to stress the rigging. It’s acceptable for the top of the sail to lightly brush against the shrouds. However, this still creates a loud shuddering noise inside the boat, mostly in my cabin! When I am awake, I know this noise is not a concern. Once I’m asleep, my brain processes these noises differently and wakes me up feeling stressed and frustrated. It doesn’t help that our mainsail is very old—so old that one of the seams let go last night. Luckily, the tear is underneath reef 2, and we are still making good time with 2 reefs in. The new mainsail is in the bag on deck, but I’m confident we’ll make it to Fiji with this sail.

I’m not sure if I should say this out loud, but I’m becoming increasingly confident that we won’t encounter any boat-stopping issues before Fiji. There are only 1,000 nautical miles to go on this leg. After this, the longest leg will be 1,300 nautical miles from Bora Bora to Tonga.

A few days ago, we started discussing the final part of our journey, our arrival and our return home. This stirred some mixed emotions but made us realize that we need to fully enjoy these last 6-7 weeks ahead of us in the most remote places we’ll visit. We are becoming more aware of how we’ll carry these memories with us for the rest of our lives.