Pitufa.at

Arrived. Champagne & tapas. Sooo happy! ++++++ Angekommen. Sekt & Tapas. Sooo gluecklich!

Yesterday the wind got quite strong, in the evening we put the mainsail into the second reef–a wise measure: during the night we had up to 30 knots of wind. The Gambier Islands are just 50 nm away now and in order to arrive there in daylight we now have to deliberately slow down, which feels funny after crawling along for a week wishing for… Continue reading »

We’ve been at sea for 22 days, still have 222 miles to go and expect to arrive in 2 days. We have strong winds now, Pitufa’s rushing fast towards her first South-Sea atoll. We can’t wait to finally get to the Gambier Islands! We’ve started with our ‘French in 30 days’ textbook, Christian’s reached the 3rd lesson, I’m warming up my highschool French and have… Continue reading »

The whole last week a weak, slow moving front (according to the NOAA forecast) followed us, resulting in fickle winds from different directions and complete calms in between. In the beginning we were glad to get some rest, be able to clean the boat, bake bread, etc., but after a while we got extremely impatient. Being becalmed means either crawling along with flapping, banging sails… Continue reading »

For whatever technical reason we could’t post on our blog for a while, but the problem is solved again. Thanks Thomas! After almost a week with light and fickle winds, it seems, according to the forecast, we’ll have good sailing conditions for our remaining 350 miles to go.++++++ Wir konnten fuer eine Weile keine Berichte auf unseren Blog schicken — aus welchem technischen Grund auch… Continue reading »

The wind continues to be very light, last night the breeze died almost completely down… We’re now wistfully thinking back to the Med, when being becalmed meant sitting on a flat, mirrorlike sea. On an ocean there’s almost always swell and the waves take a long time to go down. Being becalmed here means rolling heavily with violently flapping sails. Therefore we turned the engine… Continue reading »

The wind has turned too northerly for our twin headsails (we can only go up to about 120 degrees to the wind with the twins up), so we spent an hour taking the poles down, changing the configuration and are now beamreaching with mainsail up again. Pitufa’s sloping, but this time to the portside–so sitting on the loo’s less adventurous and everything stays in the… Continue reading »

Shortly before we arrived on Isabela our friends on Spruce left towards the Marquesas. After our 3 weeks stay in the Galapagos we got ready to leave ourselves and I remember thinking ‘my God, we’ve spent ages on Isabela, did tons of thing and these poor people are still at sea…’. In the end it’s not as bad as expected. The days on a passage… Continue reading »

Yesterday we were both quite low on energy. Exhaustion seems to build up every day and the unsettled weather didn’t help, so we had a lazy day, doing nothing but napping and reading in the cockpit. When the wind shifted further east (as we had hoped for) we were able to rig the twin headsails and go downwind. Rigging the poles, adjusting all blocks, leading… Continue reading »

We’re not much into sailing, to be honest. We don’t enjoy living inside a tumbledryer, getting up every 4 hours to sit out in the cold, sometimes wet cockpit, looking out for hostile freighters eager to sink the boat or even more hostile clouds eager to blow her over. But we endure this to arrive with our cosy home in far-away places, have cat, kitchen,… Continue reading »

Today around noon we passed our half-distance mark. After a very comfy and quiet first half of the night we passed from dark cloud to dark cloud with gusty wind and drizzle. This morning the sea was high again and confused. It’s a scary view when an especially steep and high blue mountain looms up over Pitufa’s side. It seems certain that the wave will… Continue reading »

Food’s a central topic in the life on Pitufa anyway, but even more during passages. We have a hearty breakfast around 9, a muesli or a salad at noon (hooray, we finished the bananas today, eating about 100 bananas in one week was quite a challenge–who’d have thought that the whole bunch would get ripe so quickly?? we’ll keep away from bananas for a while… Continue reading »