Part 2 of 3

Part 2 of 3

July 22nd, 2017 1300

14° 09.5 N

65° 32.9 W

150 nautical miles to go to Los Roques

We just sailed past a a small tree being captained by a booby (a seabird). The 20 foot tree had a tangle of yellow line. Yes, this was actually interesting. We are approaching 48 hours of this passage south to Los Roques and we have seen just one boat – a cargo ship Travurna that crossed 2.3 nm in front of us doing 16 kts and a Dutch Coast guard plane buzzed the rear of Ad Astra in the daytime yesterday. So, yeah, a booby commandeering an ocean-going tree is a pretty interesting event. Kyle has great fun talking about a flying fish that woke him from his nap from the fishy smell, to open eyes and see that he had a dead one in kissing distance. Except for the first one, the eight flying fish that show up dead and dry on the deck after their kamikaze flights do not make the cut of interesting.

Ad Astra is flying along with the Big Green Puff Machine (the gennekar) doing consistently in the 8s, sometimes 9s. At the start of the passage in the evening of July 20th, we had some pretty scary winds in the 30s and gusts to 38 on a close beam reach as I tried to reach between Saba and Statia to clear the Saba bank before turning for Los Roques. But it was too hard on the crew and necessary wear on the Ad Astra. There was a better path: immediately turn starboard 45 degrees downwind and head over the north of the Saba bank and turn to port for Los Roques later. The effect was immediate. Instead of Ad Astra climbing over 2-3m waves on a close beam reach and crap flying around in the salon (like a full plastic bottle of cooking oil across the floor), it was steady motion with the waves, the wind dropped its apparent speed by 8 kts, and we were still doing 7.5 to 8.5 kts. At one point I furled the genoa altogether and we were still flying. During the night we deployed the genoa or furled from zero, to full, and 1st, 2nd and 3rd reefs in between.

Yesterday morning we started with a 2nd reef in the main and by dawn I took out the reefs in the genoa. The winds kept falling in the morning, and so we went to a single reef and then by noon we were flying full canvas. We made decent speed in the upper 6s. But it was slowing as the day gave way to night, and by 2300 I turned on the starboard engine as our ETA was climbing out another day with our speed down to below 4 kts. At 0300, the speed dropped further and added in the port engine. With both screws at 2000 rpms we managed to hold 5.5 to 6 kts and keep our ETA for the calender day of Sunday. But it was reaching into the darkness. We needed to go faster.

Pulled out The Great Big Green Puff Machine at 0700, rigged it up even more smoothly than in the past, and Kyle and I had it flying in less than 15 minutes. The effect was incredible – turned off the engines in 8-10 kts on the beam and immediately we climbed to 6.5 kts and zoomed along all day.

As I type this Silent Lucidity from Queensryche takes the dream state mood up to another notch. The afternoon breeze feels great in the shade of the bimini and the Green Puff Machine. All the boat systems are in great order. One lifeline cotter pin failed, but two minutes later replaced. Thoughtless, I neglected to adjust the preventer line after I shifted the mainsheet in the middle of the light wind night. Just a few hours later the 3-strand is now a 2-strand after chaffing on the starboard stay.

We are eating fantastic! Kaiwen really came through and cooked for us her first Lasagne, potato salad, tuna salad, Japanese curry and a dozen boiled eggs. After two days all has been eaten except we still have half of the Lasagne to get us through tonight.

Assuming the wind conditions do not change at all, we will arrive sometime mid-morning tomorrow at Los Roques – the food planning seems to be about as perfect as possible. We will likely need to take the Green Puff Machine down at sunset unless the weather conditions remain as remarkably calm as they are now, and so my expectations are more for an afternoon landfall.

This is our longest passage on Ad Astra, and just Max, Kyle, Kaiwen and me. We had grand plans for the watch schedule, but that blew up immediately with those large headwinds. Instead, I am taking the bulk of the ugly watches and asking for relief when I need to catch some nap time. By yesterday everyone was recovered enough to have some family time watching the first two old Mad Max movies. Today the day-shifts were pretty normal. Seasickness reports from crew seem like it is all very mild now. All in all, I think we are doing great. I like the early change around the top of the Saba Bank. I have been able to get more sleep today and I am hoping to share the night fairly equally.

I like the night watches the best - most magical. The moon did not rise at all last night, and Venus was spectacular but she rose at 0315. The rest of the night was dominated by the great Milky Way Galaxy. I love when you slow down to watch the sky and notice that shooting stars happen all the time. I think I noticed a nebula in the milky way tail-wise from Scorpio – gotta go look that up. But the best part is the luminescence flowing from Ad Astra's wake. Just incredible. I turned off all of our lights (including the running lights) for about 15 minutes and just gazed and gazed from the port (windward) sugar scoop (aft corner). Especially with the screws turning it looked like Ad Astra was jetting out six-foot wide clouds of magical dust to carry her across the Caribbean Sea. Looking long enough I could almost forget about the water and got trance-like to think of the Milky Way and the wake to be connected as we ad astra.

I thought back to Austin, to my friends there – from the game development community, Elite Martial Arts, Bee Cave Games and the science team. I miss all of those folks. I miss going to all the great eats in Austin and all the truly awesome craft beer places. Will I ever see them again? I think so! Already folks from all three groups have crewed aboard Ad Astra. Will I ever see Austin again? I am not certain. I absolutely love the city. Would be a great place to vacation for a couple of weeks to see friends and eat better than a king. But, ahead of us we have so much to see! Even before we cross through the Panama Canal – I am perhaps most excited by Columbia. Let alone Panama, Bonaire and the rest. Looking farther to the west there is all the mystery of the great Pacific.

A good friend recently asked Kaiwen and me, why did we make this decision to go full-time cruising. It is a simple question, but there is a braid of related reasons behind this decision.

Yes, I was burned out from the games industry. After founding three game development companies, self-publishing with two of them and doing my tour of duty at Zynga I had ample reason to be well drained. Taking a long sabbatical was a luxurious option that I feel I would be an asshole not to take.

But why go sailing full-time on a boat? Why sell or give-away all of our stuff? What about homeschooling? Why not just take time off between jobs and just chill out at our great house in Austin?

I spend a lot of time thinking about politics, economics, climate change and the human settlement of Mars and the solar system. To me all of these issues are deeply related to my decision to go full-time cruising that Kaiwen, Max and Kyle have bravely supported. How will we live in the future? How will the economy work? What will the reaction be to drowned farms and cities. What decisions should we be making now?

Bluntly, I am convinced as a civilization, and especially as a nation we are making grave mistakes on how to organize our society and economy to prepare for the dynamic challenges of the next 100 years.

(If we make it 100 years, the rest will be easy.)

My university education is in Aerospace Engineering, Bachelors, Masters and then dropped out of my PhD while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My immediate focus was developing both the laboratory simulated UV light curves as well as assist in the theoretical modeling of planetary atmospheres and was working on the Galileo and Cassini missions. In the cafeteria it was common for me to sit and eat alongside astronauts and renowned principle investigators. I worked with the people who actually built and ran ALL of the most amazing of the robotic spacecraft explorers: Viking, Voyager, and on and on. Understanding the temperature and density of CO2 and other gases of planetary atmospheres in relation to incident sunlight was literally my exact focus of study and my work as a scientist. So, while I may not be a professional full-time climate scientist, I am natively comfortable with the science of climate change. There is so much to think about and discuss. But the TL;DR version is that I have concluded that globally we are not even close to understanding how existentially challenging the 21st century will be to our civilization. Change and challenge will keep on coming faster and faster. My sons will need to be robust global citizens handling dynamic stress with a positive attitude and help create the solutions.

Yet after a couple of years I quit the dream job of dream jobs at JPL, and instead joined the game industry as a junior programmer at a small game company in Los Angeles. I quit the government job essentially because it was not moving fast enough. There were many great people working hard, but society was not being their work. This was back in the 1990s when the internet was just taking off and after the Apollo and Shuttle programs, society was no longer looking outward to space, but instead inward. Colonizing Mars? Nope – Pets.com – that is !

I thought I could better help push things forward if I learned how games were created and then create a game that helps people understand how we would colonize the solar system. And after they had so much fun with the game systems and unconsciously becoming educated and developing expectations of space being developed, then perhaps there would be more public support for space development.

Twenty-three years later we have Elon Musk. He as well started with games, but saw the opportunity grabbing the low-hanging fruit of person-to-person banking and co-founded what became PayPal. He immediately turned those proceeds into investments in Tesla and SpaceX. (As well as Hyperloop, OpenAI and Solar City.) Elon and his teams alone are having an impact bigger than the rest of the United States of America on the future of the world.

Yes, I admit I wish I was doing something a thousandth of impactful as Elon Musk. I wish I was helping push the world forward.

I did create games that entertained hundreds of thousands and millions of people. The Star Trek Starfleet Command series of games, then GoPets, FarmVille, MafiaWars and then Bee Cave Games. There is deep joy in entertainment. I celebrate that work, terribly important in a world with existential anxiety at both the micro and macro levels. None of those games fulfilled that vision for exciting the public about colonizing the solar system.

But I hunger to do something more directly useful. The most important and practical thing I can do is prepare Max and Kyle for a world full of anxious trouble and fundamental changes to how we organize the world economy.

Cruising full-time on a boat I believe is the finest education for children and adults alike. First as the famous Mark Twain quote, travel kills ignorance. From the sailing and traveling our kids have spent about half of their lives in different countries. They are on their second passports, and cannot remember which country they were in six weeks ago, and are comfortable walking around in a town of a new country with a foreign language and conducting their daily businesses with adults. Both of them can drive our 30,000 catamaran with dual tank-like 55hp diesel engines – and they change the oil on those same engines on their own. They can deploy and furl the genoa, raise and reef the main, anchor, moor, plot and plan overnight passages to lands they have never seen. They can bake bread, make a few dozen recipes, and are happy to look up a new recipe and do their own provisioning run. They keep our water maker running with fresh filter changes. Do electrical and plumbing (toilet) repairs. They can SCUBA dive and hunt Lionfish and lobster, kite-surf and make their own games in Python with the laptops powered by our solar panels.

To think that this just our first year of living in the Eastern Caribbean! I cannot wait to see what we all learn in Columbia, Panama, Costa Rica – do we go to the Yucatan before heading through the Panama Canal? Then to Ecuador to base and see Machu Pichu in Peru and to get the smart cruising permit to the Galapagos. Then on to the South Pacific...

Originally posted on Facebook on July 25, 2017.