For most of our trip, the ocean has been a lonely place. We saw one ship about 4 days out from Kauai, and a second one about a week later. Other than that, it’s been just us and the occasional albatross.
For the past couple of days, though, we’ve been crossing the major shipping lanes – first the route between Asia to the Panama Canal, and now the path between Asia and California. These are heavily trafficked lanes, and we have been seeing 5-10 ships per day for the past several days.
Most of these encounters are innocuous. The passing freighter might come within 20-30 miles of us, so there’s no real cause for concern. We often can’t even see them visually – we just see their signal on our electronics.
For each of the past two nights, we’ve been more or less on a collision course with a 900’+ freighter. Two nights ago, we radioed the freighter and asked them to change course to pass astern of us since we were sailing dead downwind without much maneuverability – the captain was happy to do so.
And last night, we slowed down to let a ship pass ahead of us. Without doing that, we likely would have passed within a quarter mile or closer.
That’s what passes for excitement on a sailing passage!
Day seventeen: 151nm (23 hour day since we set clocks forward one hour) Position: 38 22N 129 24W
