We’ve had decent weather and gentle sailing conditions since escaping from the weather influence of the Hawaiian islands. Relatively settled conditions with infrequent sail changes give time to watch the passing ocean a little more closely.
Deeply saddened but unsurprised to report the significant increase in plastic floating past, the worst we’ve seen anywhere in our Kialoa voyages, even West Africa. Plastic fishing crates, buoys, bundles of warp and netting and the ubiquitous polystyrene, in lumps large and small.
More positive is the wild life. A large school of muscley very dark skinned snub-nosed dolphins, almost bouncing out of the water as they followed for a while. Thousands of aeronautically expert flying fish gliding for ages, some of which commit suicide on K IIs deck and have to be jetissoned each morning, to the delight of any following bird life.
And bird life: Albatross, terns, petrels and above all boobies.
Expert fliers, boobies often glide into position to be “towed” in the upwash behind the mainsail, circling for hours, scanning for food, dropping down to the sea surface and attempting to catch fleeing flying fish, put up by K II’s wake.
Just after dusk as the nav-lights went on a young boobie started to circle the windex in a disturbingly interested way. The windex is essentially a sailors weather vane, at the top of the mast, with a light reflective tail and wind angle markers that glows in its own special night light. A simple, effective, non electronic way to keep tabs on wind angle, the boobie started to peck at it on the wing as if it were a bioluminescent squid. Cue the crew flashing spotlights, sounding fog horns and flashing the other nav lights to try and ward it off. Completely oblivious the only solution was to turn off the windex light.
Another brown boobie, juvenile, slightly disheveled, did a couple of test runs and landed, bold as brass on the bow anchor. Quite an adept move on a pitching boat, missing the lifelines, furler and jib. More so to balance there for the rest of the afternoon and all night (completely unperturbed by the jib being furled in and unfurled) preening, peering around the furler to see if we down aft were still there. Occasionally it would lift off into the breeze, catch a flying fish, and set right back down. And periodically, we noticed next morning, like a perverse reverse dragon from GoT it would lift its tail and projectile shit all over the bow, furler, varnish and anchor.
So like many things on KII our boobie became deserving of a name. Boris the boobie. Just because of the alliteration? No, because of his similarity to his UK MP namesake: scruffy, lazy, juvenile and leaves shit everywhere for others to clean up. One obvious difference between Boris’ though: one is a Boobie, the other is a tit.
Paddy
