Day 8 – Perspectives and Reality

When John and I first started dreaming of living on a boat and traveling the world, of course our thoughts went immediately to the South Pacific, with the azure lagoons and white sand, rustling palm trees and air filled with the scent of exotic flowers.  I remember so well seeing pictures in the sailing magazines of boats at anchor with the iconic mountains of Hanavave Bay in the background……And spinning the globe looking at the expanse of the Pacific Ocean and thinking, there….just there….see?  Right across there…..

As the dream started to become a reality, I started looking beyond the glossy pictures in the cruising magazines and started paying more attention to the globe, and then the large world map that we bought.  Still, though, it was just right there….Just right across there, and then there were the Cook Islands, and oh look! there’s Tonga and Fiji – Just there!  And just south, lay New Zealand.  And heck, we had flown to Fiji several times and it was, what, 13 hours from LAX?

Then, as reality started to become very real, I started paying more attention to other cruiser’s blogs and actually looked at a chart and counted the degrees of latitude and longitude we would have to traverse in such a passage….A little more than 3000nm from Galapagos to Marquesas; another 750nm via the Tuamotus to the Society Islands; 600nm to the Cooks;  yet another 900nm to Tonga; and a whopping 1200nm from Tonga to New Zealand.  Talk about reality bites!

Ah hem….Perhaps just a bit of perspective is in order here…..

The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world, and spans 64 million square miles (plus another 6 million square miles of adjoining seas).  It covers about 1/3 of the surface of the earth.  If you were to take all the land masses on earth and place them in the Pacific, they would easily fit and would still be surrounded by, yep, the Pacific Ocean.  (Credit Earl Hines et al from “Landfalls of Paradise” for these factoids and figures.) At the equator, the Pacific measures 11,000 miles east to west and more than 9,000 miles north to south.  As a whole, the Pacific Ocean has more islands than the rest of the world’s oceans and seas combined, but because of its massive area, the reality is that it’s a huge expanse of water, empty of all but the smallest dots of islands, atolls, and landmasses.

And we are even smaller…….

You know that jet that took us from LAX to Nadi, Fiji?  It was traveling at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet and a speed of 550 miles per hour.  We on Mystic Moon are traveling at Sea level at approximately 6 kts per hour (a knot is a nautical mile, which is 1.15 statute miles, so our speed is equivalent of 6.9 mph).  Now how’s that for reality?  The good news is that traveling at this speed we shouldn’t suffer any of the ill effects of jet lag from the 3 ½  hour time difference between Galapagos and the Marquesas.  Oh Yippee.

Yes…..Maybe we are more than a little crazy…..

But then again, there’s today….

Today we crossed the 1000 nm line from our departure point in the Galapagos Islands.  One thousand nautical miles! That’s just about a third of the way there!!  We have celebrated by turning our ship’s clock back 1 hour (We will have to adjust it 2 ½ more times [WTF? ½ hour…Really??]).  AND….drumroll, please…..We finally found the favorable current!!!  Woo-hoo!!  We’ve been doing a consistent 6.5 to 6.8 knots since late this morning!   We’re practically flying over top of the waves! So then, in a fit of near giddiness, I went to the chart plotter and zoomed out from our little ship, and sure enough it was still there….Just there on the chart, and I could see it and touch it…..Right there….

Yeah, baby…..It’s all about perspective….

A note about reader’s comments:  We are receiving your comments via email from our website, and look forward to them every day —  Thank you all so much for taking the time to comment!  It is truly a highlight for all of us on Mystic Moon to read them!!  But because it’s not possible to respond on the webpage, I thought it might be okay if I replied here at the end of each post;   so…..

Judy wrote asking about night watches and what else we were watching for…..Response:  Mostly, we are looking for anything that goes bump in the night.  We use our radar for large targets such as ships or fishing vessels, but other things are strictly line of sight.  Those nights with bright moonlight or even starlight are definitely easier than those without!  I’m planning to do a post on watches soon, so hopefully will more fully answer your question with that.

Many of you wrote about my toe…..Thanks for all the well wishes – and humor, Rich, funny man.  It is much better today, but is now turning various colors, none of which you’ll find on the color wheel.  And no….I did not get my Grey Goose martini.  These people I’m with are very harsh…..