The Long Way Home
Moana arrived in San Francisco after a 41 day passage covering over 5,000 nautical miles. To compare distance traveled - 5000nm is a greater distance than twice crossing the continental US at its widest point. It is close to 1/4 of the distance around the Earth at the equator. The passage was mostly non-eventful. We only encountered one gale, had no major breakdowns, and three days of no wind. Some of the highlights were a whale swimming alongside Moana for close to a half hour and numerous dolphin encounters. One of the dolphin encounters was on a night with tremendous phosphorescence and the dolphins created a trail of fireworks in their wakes as they swam. An interesting tidbit of this passage is that we saw more ships in that 41 days than our entire journey thus far. We also discovered a stowaway 16 days out, but we'll save that story for our next update.