I just realised how long it has been since my last update… In fact, my absence could nearly be classified as a blog black hole since I arrived in Honolulu – But only because so much has been happening!

As things wind down in Hawaii, and I prepare to depart again on another long ocean-journey, I must first thank my incredible hosts in Honolulu – The Waikiki Yacht Club. Yet I guess the story of the WYC really starts just two days after my arrival, when I met Nicole Bilodeau, the Program Director for Roz Savage (if you think I’m mad, she’s a whole other kind of crazy!), who connected me with all the friendly people at the WYC. It being possibly the busiest time of year for everyone at the club, with the large Transpac fleet about to arrive, I was surprised and grateful at the positive response – To my great relief (I was having severe difficulty finding somewhere to keep Constellation that I could consider being able to afford) and appreciation, the club opened their arms to me. So I’ve been docked here, in one of the nicest clubs/marinas I’ve had the pleasure of visiting on my entire trip, for the last three weeks, enjoying Honolulu, provisioning, and repairing Constellation.

Not only did Constellation have a nice slip to stay in, but I had full run of the club facilities in a beautiful location, which was also central to all the big shops I needed to re-provision in (thanks Nicole for ferrying me around so I could buy beef jerky by the armful!). My stay here has been longer than initially intended, with a new genoa being built which now appears to be stuck somewhere in a Kentucky mail center for no logical reason (if some of you remember, I waited 8 weeks in the Canaries for my solar panels… Fingers crossed this isn’t Spanish Post Redux!). I’ll dedicate another post to my other adventures here in Hawaii, including a 5 day sail up the west coast of Oahu and details on my new sail in another entry – I really just wanted to dedicate this entry to thanking everyone at the Waikiki Yacht Club; in particular each and every member, who are technically the collective sponsors of my stay here – Special thanks to Kat Petron for liaising and understanding my predicament, and to Commodore Bill Foster, Vice-Commodore Jim Ewing, Jack Peters and everyone on the Board for making the joint decision to host me so kindly.

Nick Jaffe, Waikiki, Oahu, Hawaii.

I spent a fruitful and productive week in Sausalito, at Schoonmaker Point Marina, thanks to Rob & Adam. I spoilt myself to Mussels Bleu at the nearby French restuarant, thinking it might be my last nice meal for a very, very long time… However, I’m still on the west coast, so maybe it was a premature indulgence. I sat at the bar and recalled stories to the French maitre d’ of my most glorious time in Brittany, France. Still one of my most favourite destinations so far – Nights spent calculating the best time to navigate 8kt races or 10m tides, and gazing at the infamous lighthouse posters in every French tavern, depicting post card images of 30ft waves crashing over their tops.

As if the slip wasn’t enough, Rob & Adam kept helping with the many projects aboard Constellation – Mounting deck winches donated by my friend Bain at the Berkeley Marina, figuring out whisker poles, visiting the Latitude 38 headquarters, running me to and from West Marine for parts, backwards and forwards to many stores to get final provisions and all manner of other things – Three weeks worth of aimlessly running around doing things on my own, were done in a week… Rob even broke out the sewing machine to make Constellation a nice set of protective weather cloths to guard the cockpit and myself from incoming waves – A modification I’ve wanted to make since day one. LaDonna of Latidue 38 vacuum packed beans and rice for provisions – In my first meeting with this salty pair, they exclaimed “we’ll send you off with 25lbs of beans and rice” … And so they did! Thank you Adam for the PFD, safety line and everything else you parted with… I hope the motivation is even stronger to chase me across the Pacific and retrieve it all!

Without the assistance Marcello and Massimo of Bluemapia.com, no provisions would be onboard, and Hawaii and beyond may not have become an attainable possibility this year… Many thanks to my favourite Italians for not only employing me over the last six months, but for stepping up again and assisting in financing some of the many things that are required to do what I’m doing. These guys are passionate sailors who’ve built a great resource for the community – Use it.

Constellation has never been in better shape – She doesn’t necessarily look as Bristol as I might like, however from the point of view of what I’m doing, and what she’s already done, the sunbleached and paint stripped deck seem to represent nothing other the wrinkles found on a wise face. She’s sporting a re-cut mylar reaching sail, new luff tape on all sails for the Selden Furlex, and a pretty burgundy sailcover thanks to Mark at Doyle sails of Long Island – I exploded my genoa in Long Island sound last year in a line squall, and Mark generously expedited a replacement across to the Alameda Doyle loft two weeks ago – Thank you so much Mark.

Bain, whom I’ve lost contact with, (if you’re out there, email me!) ferried me around various chandleries, fed me, and just generally looked after Constellation and I in Berkeley – Along with Captain Ted I’ve been in great hands on the east bay. Thanks to Anthony and Jeff @ OCSC for the opportunity to do a talk on my trip, and to Karen for the helping fund the no-more-Ramen-diet I’m attempting this season.

After my brief stay in Sausalito, meeting the infamous Maria, and the not so infamous, yet humble and kind Buddhist monk Dawa, I set sail in the company of three other vessels for Half Moon Bay. Towed under the Golden Gate Bridge due to Constellations working but impossibly slow little diesel thumper, I was eventually untethered and let to roam free for the first time in the Pacific ocean. The weather was kind, and I set Windy the Windpilot on a nice tack heading West.

My friends in company eventually radioed and reminded me that we were actually supposed to be going south, but I was enjoying the sail so much, I setup a 2nm tack before bearing down on Half Moon. In light southerly winds, the other three boats needed to sail backwards and around in circles, so as not to leave me behind, before we eventually ghosted past the placid looking big wave surfspot, Mavericks, and through the breakwater into the bay.

Photo Courtesy Latitude 38 / LaDonna

Rafted up, and into town for clam chowder (one of my reasons for visiting America – To sail past the Statue of Liberty, and eat bowels of chowder), the next morning Captain Ted and I bought a Dungeness crab for brunch. I’ve never claimed to be a tough man. I couldn’t kill the crab, and so Rob did the honours, and I steamed the catch. Eating out of a bucket off the transom with butter, it was quite the occasion. My first Dungeness. LaDonna wrote a piece in Lectronic Latitude on the send-off party.

And so, as the now trio of boats motored out of the breakwater, I ran in circles and said my goodbyes over VHF. I thought in two days I would be gone… But here I am, waiting on the weather. I have a long and lonely six months ahead of me, as Constellation and I attempt to do virtually the entire Pacific (and then some), within six months. Actually, lonely isn’t the right word, but I will certainly be alone… And so the weather patterns are clearing, and the NW winds are set to resume their pattern, and I genuinly feel this weekend is going to be my departure window. I write to you from the anchorage at Half Moon Bay – These bits were posted by solar power.

I suspect my next post will be from the high seas – Remote updates will be zapped over satellite, thanks to Serversaurus.com.

Thanks for everything North America, now I have to get back to following the setting sun!

Nick.

Campaign Progress (read below to see what these numbers mean):

of the required users
of the required placemarks

As avid readers will already know, I went back to Australia for a couple of months to see family, and also to work in order to pay for all this madness. I managed to get quite a lot of work done, and was able to put together enough money to truck my boat across America, as per the plan. However, past that… The budget doesn’t allow for much else. That all being said, there is a way out of this, thanks to the founders of Bluemapia.com – The same company I’ve been working with, for the past several months. They’ve put together a sponsorship package which will provide me with the much needed funding to cross the Pacific this year – However, in return I need to achieve certain goals on the Bluemapia.com website. To briefly explain, Bluemapia.com is an online web application which allows users to freely sign up, and contribute sailing related media and information. The concept hinges around user-generated content, termed ‘placemarks’. A placemark is a piece of information (photo, text, video etc) directly related to a specific point on the earth (a waypoint). My goals are to get 300 new users on Bluemapia.com, and 600 new placemarks. That might seem like a lot, but it’s not – There are thousands of monthly viewers reading this website, and a large majority of them are sailors – You already have the knowledge, and I’m kindly asking you to consider putting it on Bluemapia.com to help me out, and also to help build up a phenomenal sailing resource. It costs nothing to signup, and everything you submit is Creative Commons licensed – That means it’s yours forever.

For all your help, and if these goals are met… I’ve organised some cool stuff to give away: Through my own volition and unrelated to the Bluemapia.com sponsorship arrangement, I’ll be giving away a prize each to the top three placemark contributors. They’re all solo sailing related, and will be shipped to wherever you are in the world (including the three great capes!):

	First prize – A SPOT Messenger – Update your position via the push of a button, to notify your friends and family, while also publishing it live to the web.
	Second prize – Four sailing books every solo sailor (or, for that matter, every sailor!) should own: Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum, Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi, The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, Alone through the Roaring Forties by Vito Dumas.
	Third prize – Sailing the world alone – A DVD documentary on the 1994 singlehanded BOC Challenge.

To take part, assist in my passage across the Pacific, and contribute your sailing knowledge to Bluemapia.com – Sign up and start adding placemarks. A counter will be added showing how progress is going in the coming days.

Thank you Bluemapia, and to everyone who continues to read this site, write comments, emails, and just show an interest!

Nick.

My return ticket to New York is now locked in for the 6th of February! It’s been a very productive and fun time in Australia, however soon it’s time to resume things and continue the trip. Thank you to Mari for the latest photo of Constellation – It was nearly 39C (about 103F) the other day here in Melbourne, and as can be seen, it’s considerably colder back on Long Island:

Right now, I’m getting quotes and trying to organise the somewhat complex overland trip that has to happen this year. I expect to be trucking Constellation sometime in April, and for myself to be over on the west coast for when she arrives – This is for a scheduled departure across the Pacific in May or early June… Right now I’ve been getting quotes from uShip.com, and the best one so far is around $3,500. If anyone is familiar with hotshot trucking, or has any contacts in the industry who might take a backhaul west, please let me know. I need to confirm a trucking solution very soon, to ensure everything goes to plan.

Much work remains to be done on Constellation, however I hope to get 90% of it done before going overland. With the generous support of Mike Acebo who runs runs the Greenport Brewer Yacht Yard, Constellation has been under his care ever since I first docked way back in June/July of 2008. Mike and everyone at the marina has been exceptionally generous, and we’re also hoping to re-do Constellation’s rig, and install a furler on the foresail before leaving New York. Without the support of Mike and the Brewer yard, there is definitely, and absolutely no way I’d be moving on this year across the Pacific. So, if you’re ever on a boat in Long Island, be sure to visit Brewer Yacht Yard in Greenport and say hello!

In other news, Lee Winters has successfully made it across the Gulf of Mexico. I watched his position closely over the last week, and this evening he managed to jump behind an island in Mexico before the wind picked up too much. Lee’s expression of ‘crying for the first time in his adult life’ and the elation you can detect in his latest blog post, brings back tremendous memories of my own sailing last year… Simon has also just made it across the Atlantic ocean alone, from the Cape Verde islands – He hasn’t updated his map yet, however I know he’s quite happily anchored in St Lucia, the Caribbean!

The feeling of achievement, relief, sadness, and pure joy after a long distance passage alone, is nearly incomprehensible to someone who hasn’t done it, yet I can assure you that both Lee & Simon deserve a really big pat on the back. Congrats!

Nick.

Sailing on your own all the time isn’t easy. Nor is finding the motivation to work alone on your own boat, especially when you’re not going anywhere soon. Working alone, can be characterised as a series of events related to figuring out how things are attached to the vessel, and more importantly, how to un-attach things from the vessel. All screws are usually through-bolted on the other side, leaving you to run into the boat, put a pair of vice grips on the nut, run back out, and through great patience take something apart.

So when Mari offered to help me, I was overjoyed. When he told me he was an electrical engineer, and I glanced at my switchbox, I did a little dance inside my head. It feels like just yesterday when I had that box wide open, manually shorting wires to try and get my nav lights working again. I never did, and ghosting into Greenport with the cabin lights as a poor substitute, it wouldn’t be until several months down the track, that I’d realise that the North Fork of Long Island were not going to let me leave again without a completely seaworthy boat.

So Mari dropped by, and asked what needed to be fixed… It was difficult trying to explain that everything needed to be fixed. I didn’t want to scare him off, but I had to be honest: Constellation was built in 1972, and I had kept things barely working through lack of money, proper tools, and a second person to help me make real repairs. The Austrians are meticulous, the Australians are adaptive. I had adapted to a boat that had so many ‘quirks’, each individual system required special knowledge just to make it function, or knowledge of where the breakages were so as to be extra careful. Nevertheless, Constellation is an incredibly well built and seaworthy boat, straight off the rack. So while I may have been less than savvy from a number of different angles, my decision on her as the boat that could do it, was sound.

We carefully took each leaky window out, drove back to Mari’s workshop, cleaned, straightened, drilled and sealed each window, before mounting them back and marveling at the possibility of a dry interior. Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that, taking several days of somewhat irritating and gooey labour. In the meantime, Mari either didn’t sleep, or had engineered several more hours of daylight onto the average day, and rebuilt my electrical panel. It now sports new switches, an LCD panel, displaying volage & current, both in and out (ie. charge from the solar panels), and even has descriptive labels! Not so long ago, the ‘EMG/NAV’ switch could have turned on any number of things, depending on what state of mind I’d been in at the last at-sea re-wiring exercise.

While all this was underway, the amazingly generous Mike Acebo of the Brewer Yacht Yard in Greenport, put two people on the job of sanding and antifouling the bottom with Interlux Micron 66. Mike has been instrumental in helping me out here in Greenport, yet I’ll dedicate an entire post to his generosity at a later date.

As the antifoul dried, Mark from Doyle Sails dropped by with my foresails recut to suit a furler, and a new sail cover. Mark was disappointed to hear I was trucking the boat, thinking I wasn’t a purest… He had a change of heart when told of my intentions to cycle, and so I was forgiven to contemplating the use of land to transport a boat.

There are still many jobs to complete, yet at last things are feeling more upbeat. When Constellation came out of the water, I knew it was going to take such an enormous effort to get her back in. My friend Walter and I put together a list of things ‘to do’ one rainy night, and the next day I looked at it with an air of depression… Yet now things now are coming together, and slowly Constellation will return to a state of seagoing glory.

Thank you so much to Mari, Mike, Nino, Rick, Walter and Mark for everything: Not only for the assistance, but also for the morale boost it provides. The wheels of this whole thing are still churning forward, even when at times it all seems ridiculous and even laughable!

And on the topic of ridiculous, I’ve put together a new video about my trip from the Caribbean to New York. It somehow blew out to 33minutes in length, and I apologise profusely for even thinking I could entertain you for that long, while I gawk and moan at the camera for 28 days.

nick.

When I met Rune Monstad in the Canary Islands, he had cycled from South America right up into Canada, before flying to Europe, and is now en route north through Africa, as part of his bicycle circumnavigation. We had a lot in common in our attitudes about what we were doing, and were also equally dogged about finishing what we’d started. However broke, however tired and however angry, we both talked about the incredible generosity we’d encountered along the way, both grateful and suprised at how people reached out in all manner of ways. Rune couldn’t stop talking about how good America had been to him, and right now, I couldn’t agree with him more.

Here at the Brewers Yacht Yard in Greenport, people are helping me left, right and centre to get Constellation seaworthy again. A furler is being installed, my sails are being converted and repaired by Doyle sails, there is talk of a Furuno radar, new standing rigging, and a replacement boom. As a result of a frontpage article in the Suffolk Times (viewable here), I regularly get referred to as ‘Nick’ from people I’ve never met in town, with the article spurring on numerous invitations for dinner, barbecues, offers of assistance on the boat, wine from Long Island wineries, and even a recording studio offering to do a recording, based on the premise of the article mentioning I had a rusty guitar!

If all that wasn’t enough, recently a family motored into the Marina to meet me, holding up the paper to passers by, asking where I was. After a brief meeting, they were back the following week with a proposal: What if a party was thrown to raise money to truck Constellation across America? I was speechless, and I think all I could muster was a ‘Are you kidding? Really?’ I was bowled over by the idea, and within a few days, invitations circulated, the party had a date, and Constellation and I may just get across this great continent as planned! I’d been depressed over the enormity of the scheme, it all be very well to have an idea, but a whole other problem to make it happen. The cost of trucking a 3.5 ton sail boat from New York to San Francisco is no small sum, and sailing back to the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal is also no small feat… The Northwest Passage may be ‘open’, but Constellation told me in a dream, she was no ice breaker, and while Cape Horn beckoned (ha!), I’ll save those latitudes for the aluminium expedition ketch I spend too much time thinking about. So this party nears the end of the month, and with it brings great excitement at the thought of getting closer to solving the age old problem of getting into the Pacific from the Atlantic.

If it seems this blog may have become slightly neglected since I arrived here, I must apologise, it probably has, yet only for good reasons: Life has been full throttle, traveling in and out of the city from Long Island, visiting friends, relatives, racing boats, and generally having the time of my life. I’ve already said that sailing north from the Caribbean was a really good decision, but I have to say it again: Sailing north from the Caribbean was a really good decision.

I mentioned some months ago that I was going to Vancouver for a wedding, and that time has come. I’m terrified of doing the Best Man Speech, which is by far scarier than doing a solo transatlantic… All I can say is, it’s lucky I bought more than one bottle of Mt Gay Rum from Barbados; I’ll have to take mouthfuls of the stuff prior to toasting the the newlyweds, balancing a fine line between doing the speech in a pirate voice and actually not embarrassing myself nor the groom.

I haven’t been doing a great deal of sailing recently, so I hope my land based adventures are enough to keep everyone interested. Below are some photos of a trip to upstate New York:

Bailing

My brother and I

Rock jumping

My brother & Tracy

Next post from latitude 49.25 longitude -123.13.

nick.