A Day on Passage

A sailing friend asked me about my day on passage, and it’s honestly not very exciting. We follow a pretty standard schedule every day, driven by necessity as we have to maintain a watch at night and we take turns keeping watch. So in describing a day on passage, I will begin with the night watch:

• 8pm boat time – Jodi goes to bed, Magnus has first watch
• 11pm boat time – Magnus goes to bed, Jodi has second watch
• 2am boat time – Jodi goes to bed, Magnus has third watch
• 5am boat time – Magnus goes to bed, Jodi has fourth watch
• 8am boat time – Magnus gets up, we make breakfast and eat together. Any necessary sail changes are done, before breakfast if needed but preferably after breakfast.
• After breakfast and morning chores, Jodi takes a nap if possible. Magnus stays on deck.
• After Jodi’s morning nap, we do projects. Today we changed all the filters on our watermaker, flushed the system and started making water. We also cleaned out the grey water pump in the bilge, as it had become a little slow and occasionally overflowed. Both the grey water box and the pump itself needed cleaning. We also did a load of laundry.
• Lunch after chores, and then Magnus goes down for his daily nap after lunch if possible. Today after lunch I spent an hour cutting plastic waste into small pieces and stuffing it into available containers. The picture on the blog is all our trash – paper, plastic, glass and metal – after 3 weeks at sea. The only thing we throw overboard is compostable waste (coffee grounds, eggshells, food scraps, etc.). Hard plastic containers are used to contain soft plastics – so for example the big empty bottle of conditioner is filled with plastic wrap from foods and other household items. Metal cans are stacked together where possible and filled with scrap metal, such as tinfoil used in baking.
• We have a quiet afternoon, doing small jobs, reading, catching up on internet, looking for fish on our lines. Today our fishing lines got tangled so we spent some time untangling them.
• Dinner is served by 6pm at the latest, to give time to enjoy eating and then get the clean-up out of the way and also cool down the cabin before sleep, if the oven was used.
• At 7pm Jodi preps the cabin for the night and Magnus brews a cup of coffee around 7:30pm in preparation for his night shift.

We don’t always get to take naps, some days we spend so much time on chores / projects and sail changes that the time to nap has disappeared. And Murphy’s law is that when you just get a project spread out all over the cockpit, a fish will bite and you have to clear everything out to try to bring in the fish. Out on the Pacific, the fish are bigger, and we are losing more fish – the hooks are being straightened and the fish are escaping. That’s not a bad thing – we can’t eat too big of a fish, we don’t have a freezer and it’s hard to get a big fish on board. But you still have to take care of the line.

This trip has been pretty solitary, we haven’t seen another vessel on our plotter / AIS in about two weeks. Fortunately, we have internet access, and can keep in touch with other sailing friends so we feel connected to other people. We also use an app called “No Foreign Land”, where we can see what other vessels are in our general area but too far to see on our plotter. Through No Foreign Land, we have met several sailors and received many good tips.

That’s a day on passage on the Pacific Ocean, Sunday 16 March 2025.