How to tell when you’re in a washing machine and not the tradewinds

Today on watch I listened to the episode of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast Wiser Than Me where she speaks with food writer Ruth Reichl. Ruth’s sage advice is to say yes to the things that frighten you and to continue to learn how to do things that you don’t know how to do throughout your whole life.

In that light, we’re following Ruth’s advice to a T with this adventure! There was no update yesterday because we were in a washing machine that we didn’t know we were in for 24 whole hours, until we weren’t in it anymore after the sun set last night. We thought this washing machine was the trade winds from a wind strength perspective, but the swell was coming from three different directions and it was brutal. Not unsafely, but from a comfort perspective — wildly uncomfortable. Having never experienced the trade winds, we were so confused about how people thought it was the “Coconut Milk Run” — more like curdled milk.

But then, because things always shift, the swells started to disintegrate and picked back up into one major swell and one minor swell that at least we could deal with even though the winds were shifty. Aha — this felt more like the trades rather than getting rinsed on repeat.

We are working to keep the swell behind us as best we can, and it’s still quite the roller coaster ride. We’ve switched to two hour watches since it’s pretty active watching of wind direction and swell shifts, and we’ll see what lessons the ocean will teach us next. We are working to keep our spirits up as best as we can by appreciating how far flying fish can fly and by injecting dark humor by joking that if people knew how “fun” this was, there’d be boats all over the place out here. The miles are ticking downward and sometime soon we’ll find the halfway mark mileage-wise.