Hawaii to Vancouver Island

My schedule called for departure form Pittsburgh to Hawaii on May 13 – I should have known better. Useless Scareways put me through one of their creeping delays. I arrived at the airport around 0500 for my 0700 flight. They loaded us aboard on time but we were then advised that there was a “small” mechanical issue. At 1000, we were still sitting and there was no chance I would make my connection in Phoenix. Got off the plane, got my bags returned and headed home to try again the next day.

Finally made Ko Olina late the evening of the 14th. Joining me on this passage were Steve Parsons, our regular Captain and his mate, Captain Rodger Girvin who made the passage from New Zealand to Tahiti with us last year. It looked like we had a good weather window so the next morning we returned the rental car, cleared out and tossed the lines at 0900 for the 2300 nautical mile journey to Port Sidney on Vancouver Island.

Along the, I updated Steve Dashew with daily reports via Sailmail over the HF radio. I won’t repeat them here but they can be accessed by going to Setsail.com.

The following pictures show our total journey from New Zealand to French Polynesia thru the Line Islands and Palmyra to Hawaii and our onward journey to Vancouver.

Lots of water and a very long way. At the center point of our journey from Hawaii to Vancouver, the closest land was over 1100 nautical miles away.

Overall, we could not have asked for a nicer passage. The roughest part of the trip was about 12 hours against the trade winds after we rounded the northern end of Oahu. After that, the maximim winds we saw were about 25 knots and they were always aft of the beam.

Fishing was good until we hit the colder waters of the North Pacific so we we had an ample supply of fresh Mahi Mahi. We even had some strange birds that came to roost on our forward mast.

We did have one interesting weather event as we neared the end of our trip. A weak low pressure system bumping up against a stationary high created a weak compression zone. When we saw the following 6 millibar drop in barometric pressure over a one hour period, we were pretty certain we were going to get pounded. Just as quickly, the barometer rebounded to 1021 – no wind and just a few light rain showers.

Total time at sea was just over 10 days. In my next post, I will cover our arrival in the US and our encounter with the Puget Sound Pilot Pirates.