Day 9: We are back inReach!

Tuesday, July 6th, 2021

37°30'39''N - 43°41'07''W

If no one onboard got much sleep yesterday night, at least, we got to spend the dark hours “resting” (read: “being tossed around in bed”) in our cabins.

Last night, Ryan and I spent all of our time from midnight to 7 AM motoring and making sail changes in the cockpit. We were exhausted, wet from the humidity and condensation, irritable and a bit demoralized.

Anett found me at 8 AM half passed out on the settee, wrapped in a blanket in my PJs with massive dark circles under the eyes. I think I fell asleep on my way to my bed, within 30 seconds of her taking watch.

I didn’t think that this would make for a good day onboard. But when I woke up around noon, the sun was shining and we were making some good progress at 5 knots Eastwards. Not too shabby after a night of mostly motoring and managing flogging sails.

Our batteries were full from our night on the engine and the sea state was friendly enough to run the watermaker.

This meant that after 5 days without washing my hair, I was finally able to take a shower and wipe clean the ecosystem that was starting to grow on my scalp.

I made myself a good cup of coffee (the first one in 48 hours) and dug in our snacks cabinet to find all the sweets I could possibly bring to the cockpit. While Anett caught up on some sleep in her cabin, Ryan and I spent a lazy afternoon keeping watch, eating candy, and making plans for the rest of our crossing.

At this point, it had been 4 days since we lost the Iridium Go and three days since tanker ship Tim Timothy contacted our shore support, Willem.

We started to suspect that in spite of our best effort, we wouldn’t be able to recover any form of contact with shore. All Willem had received was a random phone call from a tanker ship that had long passed us, an EMEI number, an activation code and absolutely nothing else to work with.

We knew that it was a long shot. We kept trying to run the “ data plan activation” on our InReach, but nothing came through.

Almost 72h after our VHF call to tanker ship Torm Timothy, we tried to forget about it.

Instead of hoping that we would get our satellite communications back, we focused on the resources we had on hand and sent VHF messages every hour on channel 16.

“All ships, all ships, all ships, this is sailing vessel Polar Seal, Polar Seal, Polar Seal. Anyone with a current weather forecast please answer this message. Polar Seal on channel 16, over.”

Hour after hour, we received no answer.

At that point, we had enough wind to maintain our course East, but barely. We didn’t have enough fuel to afford to motor all the way to Horta and had gotten clues that the winds were North of us.

So before sunset, we decided to alter course. We gybed the boat over and started a pretty steep climb North, keeping a course of 40° North/North East.

The sea state was nice, and we could finally have the halfway party that was postponed twice. I went down to the galley, got everyone drinks (including a celebratory beer for myself, the epitome of indulgence on a crossing!), turned the stereo on, and threw some dinner on the stove.

Ten minutes later, I heard some exclamations from the cockpit. When I popped my head through the companionway, I saw Anett, camera in hand, and a big smile on Ryan’s face.

“We received an SMS on the InReach!!!”

I couldn’t believe it.

“What?!!! What does it say?!”

“I don’t know, the InReach is still running the data plan activation”

Five minutes later the InReach read:

“Welcome to InReach! Check out all of the great messaging, tracking, and social features. Reply to test”

And just like that, we had some satellite communications back on and contact with shore again!

Our very first message went to Charlie, from www.myweatherrouter.com, who weather routes our buddy boat Zanzibar. Charlie had started to send us some very detailed passage planning daily, and if somebody could help us navigate “in the dark”, it was him.

We immediately received a very enthusiastic answer, telling us that he was glad we were back in touch and that we would receive a forecast and routing suggestions within 30 minutes.

And without fail, as we were finishing dinner and continuing our halfway celebration (now turned sat coms celebration too), we had a solid sailing and weather plan to continue our passage to Horta!