Ophelia Offshore

A passage is many things, but mainly it’s hour after hour after hour spent in a small, confined space with your crew, isolated and disconnected from the physical world you once knew. We all crossed the same stretches of ocean, never more than twenty feet apart, but we all have different favorite moments, different low points, and different stories we’ll tell for years. Here is what the crew remembers.

Best Day

• Jesse: Not sure what day it was, but it was soon after exiting the ITCZ. After the heat and then the lightning there came a day or two where the wind was good and we just got to sail. I felt like I enjoyed life again and didn’t know that I would again right before that point.
• Chelsea: The first day of downwind sailing with the spinnaker up – we unfolded the cockpit table, played hearts, and the boat finally stopped thrashing around.
• Dirk: I had been such a good (read: terrible) deckhand and person that they decided to let me sleep through one of my shifts. It was the first time I’d slept 6+ hours in a row in quite awhile, and I woke up feeling so refreshed and alive. I made a giant breakfast scramble and everyone debated if they should let me sleep more the rest of the trip. I so distinctly remember feeling energized, because the vast majority of time that is not how you feel on a crossing!
• Sarah: April 15th – we crossed the equator during the very early hours of the morning with a quick dance party and toast to King Neptune. That morning we also completed our crossing of the Chinese fishing fleet. The weather was calm enough and the autopilot was working with the existing seas to allow all four of us to play cards. We also ate my favorite dinner of the trip that night (see below). The night finished off with a brilliant red-orange sunset.

Most Beautiful Moment

• Jesse: My peaceful morning sails. While the boat was asleep and the sun wasn’t too hot yet I could just lay in the cockpit and listen to the waves.
• Chelsea: The night there was no moon and we were sailing under starlight alone – we all sat up in the cockpit stargazing at the new constellations in the southern hemisphere. A reminder of our infinite smallness.
• Dirk: The night we all sat outside and stared at the stars. It was the first very clear night in the Southern Hemisphere with no moon. The intensity of the stars and the Milky Way were things I had glimpsed from the remote reaches of Oregon and Utah, but in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the stars burned themselves into my memory. It was one of those beautiful moments that makes you feel the smallness of your own existence and the vastness of the magic of existence in a universe larger than our comprehension.
• Sarah: Staring at the nighttime sky with zero clouds or light pollution to hinder the view on one particularly beautiful night. The stars were like nothing I have ever seen before with stars touching the horizon. The Milky Way was so immensely bright and colorful.

Scariest Moment

• Jesse: Almost burnt the boat down…. obviously.
• Chelsea: When the MPPTs cooked and we didn’t know exactly what the problem was yet. I immediately jumped to worst case scenarios in my head, imagining the entire electrical system was going down and we’d have to learn to use the sextant onboard to get back to land. But hey, we have a sextant, an entire course book on how to use it, an offline timepiece, and this year’s nautical almanac on board, so I never went into full panic mode.
• Dirk: In retrospect the scariest moment is also one of the funnier ones because of its ridiculousness. The furler on the genoa sail came unwound all of 3 hours off the coast of Cabo. The seas were a bit choppy and it was unclear (and unsafe) to try to diagnose in the dark so we fired up the motor and turned around into my first experience of rough seas. Jesse would punch the motor as Ophelia rode up the crest of a wave, and then the hull would come smashing down in the trough. This was terrifying to me as I couldn’t help but wonder how many beatings a hull like that could take before it eventually weakened and broke. Similar to thinking about what happens when the wings fall off an airplane while you’re flying I guess. By the end of our sailing trip I suspect I would be somewhat nonplussed by the same scenario. Or at least not worried about surviving.
• Sarah: Crossing the Chinese fishing fleet. When you added together the challenges of a language barrier + weaving through boats like the hardest game of snake you’ve ever played + a 100 mile long course, I was so nervous for this section of the crossing.

Biggest Win

• Jesse: Discovering it wasn’t that hard to sleep on passage. Just actually needed to kick Sarah out of what we didn’t know at the time was the best berth – the aft birth. (Editor’s note: Which, to be clear, Sarah had been trying to convince us to sleep in from the start, but we had assumed it was a bad bunk so kept declining.)
• Chelsea: Successful crossing of the Chinese fishing fleet! We had debated for days if we were going to do it or not, so making it through so easily was a huge win.
• Dirk: Literally when I won a game of hearts. Jesse is a cutthroat card player that is very serious about his cards. Sarah, Chelsea and I are really Go Fish players at heart. So when we all failed to play by the norms of hardcore hearts players, Chelsea and Sarah inadvertently gifted me the win. But it was not a setup!
• Sarah: Crossing the Chinese fishing fleet. I am still in awe how smoothly it went navigating through 100 miles of a dense Chinese fishing fleet (moving in all directions) without the ability to communicate directly with any of the boats due to the language barrier.

Biggest Frustration

• Jesse: Trying to sail a boat across the ocean with very little wind. Tied with trying to set up sun shades with very little sleep.
• Chelsea: Weather – light and variable winds followed by a never ending squally ITCZ made it incredibly difficult to keep the boat moving. And then the oppressive heat – one morning it felt like I couldn’t even breathe and I just sat on the transom while Jesse and Sarah sprayed cold water over me in hope of reviving me physically and mentally.
• Dirk: The incessant heat with the lack of sleep just built itself up in all of us. I think we were all working hard not to let our miserableness lash out at each other. Or at least I was, maybe everyone else was having a great time and they were really good at pretending to be miserable. I would have paid a lot of money for one night in a flat bed with AC.
• Sarah: The heat. I expected hot temps during the day but didn’t expect the temps at night to essentially stay within a degree or two of the daytime temps.

Best Meal

• Jesse: Anything involving the gnocchi.
• Chelsea: Sarah’s stovetop homemade jojos. Unreal that she was able to make these on a hot day over a hotter stove.
• Dirk: Thanks to the monumental efforts of Sarah and Chelsea, we ate incredibly well at sea. In fact I might argue too well. One dinner that stands out was Burger Bites. Sarah somehow fried up potato wedges like french fries and made little hamburger patty pieces to dunk in an aioli sauce. Simply divine.
• Sarah: Chelsea’s tuna noodle casserole! This reinvention of the classic with real broccoli, nutritional yeast, and crunchy toppings is something I still dream about. Coconut pancakes with fresh citrus and a side of bacon is a very close second.

Biggest Surprise (Good)

• Jesse: How much I enjoyed the experience of crossing an ocean, despite how miserable it was at times. I’d do it again.
• Chelsea: How well crew moral did in the face of our weather and sea state conditions – I guess I’m not surprised, that’s why we all set off on this trip together, but I’m still impressed with this crew for always taking care of each other and finding something to laugh about even when things were pretty miserable.
• Dirk: Our first squall in the doldrums! It was a smaller one and started pouring cold rain on us. It was a heavenly gift. Jesse told me he was cold and I was in awe and honestly jealous. I had almost forgotten what that feeling was.
• Sarah: Seeing bioluminescence light up behind the boat, marking our passing through the waves. I didn’t expect this to be so bright and so frequent. It kept me entertained for hours during many of my night watches.

Biggest Surprise (Bad)

• Jesse: The heat was unbearable and I’m pretty sure I had the early signs of heat exhaustion showing. I knew Chelsea was struggling too and I felt like I hadn’t slept more than a couple hours total over about a three day period.
• Chelsea: How hard it was to sleep with the unfavorable weather and sea state. You picture the worst of the trip being bad seas, breakages, medical emergencies, but in the end it was the lack of sleep that was the most difficult to deal with. It colors everything else in darker and darker shades as you become more and more sleep deprived.
• Dirk: Number one would be the electrical system meltdown in which we lost half our solar power in one fell swoop. Suddenly niceties like an autopilot were no longer guarantees.
• Sarah: How helpless you feel to try to outrun any storms that appear on the radar. Storm clouds move way faster than a sailboat and appear suddenly on the radar with no warning.

Laughed the Hardest

• Jesse: Planning the future sailing RPG and all the random things that we’ll throw at people.
• Chelsea: While Dirk singing Mr. Spoonman as Jesse clung to the bow jury rigging the whisker pole with a piece of a bamboo spatula was incredibly funny, it is still second to watching Sarah attempt to refill the dish soap dispenser in rough seas.
• Dirk: When sleep deprivation hit its maximum, all I recall is being able to make the stupidest jokes imaginable and then just have Chelsea and myself literally be in tears from laughing at it. I don’t think we were ok, but after we got a better handle on our sleep the laughter died down. I wish I could remember one of these “jokes” but it’s probably for the best I can’t.
• Sarah:  We were about halfway through the journey and three of us were working together to try and refill the dish soap dispenser. What would be the simplest task on land became the Mount Everest of accomplishments on a sailboat, being tossed about by the waves with the dish soap running down the bottle, making it impossible to hold onto. The ridiculousness of failing at this task, flying side to side on the boat, spilling soap everywhere, after all that we had faced on this journey, had me laughing so hard I was crying.

Cried the Hardest

• Jesse: Big boys don’t cry. (Editors note: Instead, they hold in their emotions and crumble inwards into a shell of who they once were until the entire crew is worried about their wellbeing, since this is the person who really needs to sail us the rest of the way across the ocean.)
• Chelsea: Knowing we had to do another sail change on the deck in the midday sun during the heatwave.
• Dirk: The thing about crying is that it takes energy. And moisture. And honestly I was so out of the former and worried about the latter that instead of crying, I just stared with dead eyes for days straight and tried to not be 100% useless on the boat. My soul was crying, if not my eyeballs.
• Sarah: It’s honestly a bit of a blur looking back, but I guarantee it was a moment that involved heat exhaustion, sleep exhaustion, a touch of seasickness, hand steering, diesel fumes, and an inability to get the boat to make forward progress along our goal pathway. I typically found this to be a state that could only be cured by pancakes and bacon.

Favorite Memory of Something That Could Only Happen at Sea? 

• Jesse: Dirk, Sarah, and Chelsea all actually listening to me.
• Chelsea: Waking up on a shared night watch to see Dirk gripping the helm, hand steering us through rough seas, proclaiming “Live by the sea, die by the sea!” A quote we employed frequently for the remainder of trip as a gauge on moral. Are we living by the sea, or dying by the sea today?
• Dirk: There was one magical night in which Sarah and Jesse were watching thunderstorms on the radar and trying to make some sail changes, but I was staring at the water because there were giant blobs of light flashing! I was absolutely enraptured with this incredible sight, it was fairly dark out and I kept telling Sarah and Jesse there were lights in the water, and they ignored me and continued to make sure we didn’t run into a thunderstorm. We later saw similar lights in an anchorage in French Polynesia and we guess they are made by a jellyfish.
• Sarah: Finding a flying squid that had launched itself out of the ocean, through the obstacles on deck, down the stairs, into the very tiny wooden pocket shelf where we kept our headlamps. And having “pet” red-footed boobies.

Favorite Quote

• Jesse: Not really a quote, but “Milly Booby Brown” and “Mittens” were the nicknames of our Bobbies who hung out with us for like ten days.
• Chelsea: “The ocean will reshuffle” – ChatGPT, when asked somewhere around day eight for a moral boosting speech.
• Dirk: “Live by the sea and die by the sea” -Dirk Heniges, sleep deprived, having hand-steered for a 3 hour stretch of the wee morning hours.
• Sarah: “Land ho!” – for obvious reasons.