Hawaii-Midway-Attu, Day 1, June 12, 2008

Hawaii-Midway-Attu, Day 1, June 12, 2008
by Bob

We left Oahu at 11:45 pm Thursday, an hour and a half ago and 15 minutes before Friday the 13th.

We're about 4 miles off shore, motoring on one engine. The wind is less than two knots. The ocean is glassy most of the time. The
moon is out. All in all, it's very nice outside.

Josh came in today around noon, Cathy at 2:45, and Melinda at about 9:44 this evening.

Our plan is to sail to Midway Island, around 1100 miles northwest of Oahu, stay there for a few days before heading on to Attu
Island. Attu is the last (or first, if you're in Siberia) island in the Aleutian chain, the "tail" of Alaska. That's another 1500
miles or so.

From Attu, we plan to follow the Aleutians and the Alaska Peninsula, and southern coast of Alaska down to Canada and Washington.
That's a few more miles.

We don't have enough diesel to motor the entire distance, so before too long we'll either find some wind or float for a few days
until the wind finds us. The forecast looks like a moderately slow sail to Midway, with the wind coming up to 15 knots early next
week.

This morning Mike and I got up before the sun. We managed to drive the boat to the fuel dock without hitting anything big, not even
other boats. After filling up with diesel, we put some reserve fuel in some cans. I managed to splash a bit over the deck and
myself.

So, being the neatnick I am, I cleaned it up. I used some bath towels and some really strong smelling alcohol-based household
cleaner from France. I threw the towels into a trash bag along with some dirty clothes and new underwear from Walmart. I threw them
into a washer in the laundry.

In about 38 minutes, I returned to toss the clothes into the dryer. But when I opened the washer door, it smelled like a lemon
diesel factory. So I started up another wash cycle. Later, Mike went to the laundry to pick the clothes up. He eventually found them
in the washer instead of the dryer. He said the whole laundry smelled like lemon diesel by then.

A lady in the laundry gave Mike a tongue-lashing for putting diesel clothes in the washing machine. Although Mike didn't deserve
this specific lecture, it should count for one of the many things has done that he deserved a lecture for.