BY THE PACIFIC PUDDLE JUMP / SAIL TAHITI
Ask a cruiser about the passage that changed them. A lot of them won’t say Cape Horn, or some survival story from the North Atlantic. They’ll tell you about the Puddle.
That’s what sailors call the Pacific, the Puddle, as if the biggest ocean on the planet were just a wet patch you skip over on the way to somewhere better. It’s a joke, obviously. The crossing behind that joke runs about 3,000 nautical miles from the Pacific coast of the Americas to French Polynesia, and it is one of the longest open-water passages a cruising sailor will ever attempt. Three, maybe four weeks at sea. No land, no marina, no other faces than the ones already on your boat. You point the bow west, and the next thing you touch is a mountain rising out of the water in the Marquesas.
For close to thirty years now, the boats that make that leap each spring have done it under one name: the Pacific Puddle Jump. It isn’t a race, nobody’s timing you, and there’s no trophy waiting in Tahiti. Call it a rally if you need a word for it. What it really is is a couple hundred strangers agreeing to cross the world’s biggest ocean at more or less the same time, and to keep an eye on each other along the way.
It started with a list
The whole thing began in 1997, and the origin story is about as humble as the nickname. Andy Turpin was editing at Latitude 38, the West Coast cruising magazine, and he kept noticing the same thing every season. Down in the harbors of Mexico and Central America, boats would gather with that same faraway look in the crew, provisioned to the waterline, spares stuffed in every locker, all of them quietly working up the nerve to sail to Tahiti. They didn’t know each other. They were each chewing on the same questions about weather windows and gear and whether they could really stand a month offshore, and they were doing it alone.
