Hello World,

This is Matt. We’ve been sailing for ~53 hours and have had a lot of fun. I personally have learned how to use a sextant! After much trial and error (time is something I have plenty of) I have successfully located our position using the sun, sextant, a watch, and books! My location was within 15 miles of the GPS. For anyone curious/wanting to waste time, I highly recommend going on a wikipedia tangent to research celestial navigation, sextants, and spherical geometry.

In other news, Jackie cooked her first meal from scratch today (with my help). We made banana pancakes using 3/4 cup flour, 1.75 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, ground flax seeds, 1 egg, and milk (Vermont maple syrup on top of course). Unfortunately several crew members were sleeping so I had to eat most of the pancakes. Don’t worry, we brought way too much cereal.

While we didn’t listen to any Jack Johnson in the galley (kitchen on boat), we do pretend it’s the weekend every day here in paradise. It’s been great weather, kind of calm seas, and I got to see glow in the dark dolphins!

As my last comment I regretfully admit we have not caught any fish. We did almost catch a few birds… Apparently a trolling lure looks pretty appetizing to birds out here. We had to abandon fishing for a while until the shearwaters  lost interest.

Hope all is well on land!

-Matt Johnson

 

Only 8 days until we disembark! Still tidying up some loose ends, but we are just about ready to go.

     

Here’s some of the sustenance Jackie and Matt have been gathering for the crew. Quite the spread to keep everyone eating healthy and happy. And yes, that is a tower of canned chicken. Please stay tuned for more updates once our voyage has begun!