In late July, Hula Girl departed Oahu for California with a crew of offshore cruising students and yours truly as skipper. With a strange year for the return weather, we ended up sailing almost all the way… we motored for something like six hours thru the very bottom corner of the Pacific High, but that was about it. We cranked off the miles, and got back to CA in about 13 days.

We had a truly fantastic group aboard the boat, and it was an absolute pleasure to get to sail with each and every one of them. Everyone did a great job, and made it easy on me… they sailed the boat over 2000 miles (I think the autopilot was on for only three hours when motoring!) and should be proud proud of what they accomplished.

The good times are too many to mention, but we expect an upcoming cinematic release to document the journey (right Jorge?)… I will take pause to mention this highlight: Jon and Madeline getting married as we sailed in under the Golden Gate bridge after 2000 miles at sea! Very cool….

Anyway, I’m not sure what else to add… I could literally write for days describing the nights at sea, the sensation of the Hula Girl cutting thru the ocean, the camaraderie of the crew, and so on…. but I’ll spare you all my ramblings and share some photos:

Hula Girl in Hawaii

Leaving the Islands

Joe In Command

Double Rainbow Mid Pacific…

Madeline at the helm… and making a fashion statement!

Crew polishing off dinner, enjoying the last bit of another sunset…

Jorge making it look easy… hey, is that a squall out there??

A full rainbow! With a double! You don’t get ’em like this at home…

Barry keeping watch.

The night shift.

Life on board, at an angle…

The Honeymoon Suite. The Ritz it ain’t, but the the view is a solid ten stars.

Coming to the aid and transferring a battery to our friends on Deception, 1000 miles from the nearest speck of dry land.

Jon and Madeline… the happy couple…. awwwww….

A brief pause in the calm of the Pacific High… enjoying the view from aloft and swimming in 15,000 feet of clear, clear water…

The view from below

Sunrise

Hula Girl heads for the barn.

All the best,

Wayne Zittel for the Hula Girl crew

Well, for a bit there, it looked like we would miss the whole Pacific High on our way to San Francisco from Hawaii. It looked like we were just going to scoot under it without ever getting to the calm waters typical of the center, but last night around 2am the high grew a bit, just enough to include us in it’s personal party. Being night and all when the wind dropped, we fired up the motor and continued on our merry way. Thru the morning watches, we didn’t see much more than about 4 knots of breeze. Very calm waters, and nice clear skies.

So there we were, motoring along when suddenly the engine quit. Just like that. Hmmm… not good, I am thinking. My first fear was that we had caught some trash, some scrap of a fishing net, that was drifting here in the high (we all know about all the trash out here… amazing/depressing how much we see in the middle of nowhere). I jumped down below and opened the engine compartment… I was relieved to find that I could spin the prop shaft by hand (meaning that it wasn’t fouled), but then perplexed as to what the problem might be. Well, a quick look at the Racor fuel filter revealed a fair amount of gunk in the fuel. So off came the filter, replaced with a spare and away we go, right? Not so fast… the fuel system isn’t priming… we can’t get the fuel system bled. Finally, after pulling apart the lines to the tank and clearing them, we get the engine running again. And we were off. For 15 minutes.

Yep, motor died again. Looked at the Racor again. Filled with junk again. So we have basically had to write off our whole fuel tank as contaminated… too bad, since that’s where about half of our fuel happens to be! But we have about 40 gallons in jerry cans, and we have rigged the engine to run from these, so we are good to go for the time being. And given the weather outlook, far more than we’ll need to get the Hula Girl and her crew back to the barn.

Once we had the engine sorted, we took a bit of time to enjoy where we were. A couple of rides up the mast yielded some very cool pictures. And the swimming was phenomenal. Diving into a pool 16,321 feet deep (well, hat’s what the chart says… we didn;t verify it) of crystal clear water (where you can see something like 5 miles down!) is a bit intimidating when you think about it… especially when you consider that anything 5 miles down can see you too!) So we didn;t think about it and just enjoyed the swim and showers. After our break, we were off again. We motored for another couple hours, but then started to stick our nose out the eastern side of the high (as expected), and we were off sailing again!

And so starts to final leg of our trip. It’s forecast to be a light reach, then building into a windy reach. Then maybe getting light again as we near the coast. But we’ll see. As we learned (again) toady, nothing is for certain.

A hearty dinner (build-your-own-burrito-bar) was had by all. Jorge and Madeline are on watch right now, and the rest of the crew are getting a bit of rack time and preparing for the cooler night watches up in this part of the ocean. Good times. And a beautiful day. The little issues were good challenges to overcome, and great learning experiences.

Now may turn to hit the rack. You all have a great evening, and we’ll check in again soon.

All the best,

Wayne Zittel and the Hula Girl Crew

Our Spot tracker page is: http://tinyurl.com/hulagirl