Dealing with the big Pacific

It rolls the mid-most waters of the world, the Indian Ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of the newly built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the most recent race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky ways of coral isles, and low-lying endless, unknown archipelagos, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay of it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.

Herman Melville. Moby Dick; or, The Whale

At 165,250,000 square kilometers, the Pacific Ocean covers more than a third of the planet’s surface.

As Magellan exclaimed when they left behind the Straits that today bear his name and ventured into unknown open waters on a westerly course: “A sea more vast than the mind can conceive.” It was the 1520s, and they were on a voyage of discovery that would become the first known world circumnavigation. Not even a decade later, Diogo Ribeiro published the Padrón Real, a map that for the first time showed the Pacific at about its amazing proper size.

An ocean home already for much older cultures than the golden times of European sailing expansion across the world.

It was already during the last ice age, when sea levels were around 130 meters lower than today and the islands of Southeast Asia were part of a continent known as Sundaland, that people could walk across most of what is now Indonesia as far as Borneo and Bali. From there, they crossed over the sea to Australia and New Guinea. Afterwards, and across another stretch of water, they colonized the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands, where their expansion stopped for about 20,000 years.

Then in much more recent times, a new culture swept over their area and set sail into the vast expanse of the South Pacific—skilled seafarers who memorized navigational instructions and passed their knowledge down through folklore, cultural heroes, and simple oral stories. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools, and yet they colonized all habitable atolls, islets, and islands in Polynesia, the latest ones seeing their arrival by the year 1200, establishing what was, until the modern era, the largest single cultural area in the world. An incredible story of the successful colonization of the largest ocean on the planet.

Its size is larger than all of Earth's land area combined, twice the area of Europe’s most well-known ocean, the Atlantic.

Large as it is, it contains many famed places. In it, for instance, we can find one of the most legendary islands: Easter Island, the easternmost of the Polynesian group, claiming to be one of the remotest in the world. Looking at its opposite shores, more than 6,000 nm away, we can find the deepest known part of any ocean, the Mariana Trench, almost 11,000 meters deep. On its southwest corner, the renowned Cape Horn stands as the southernmost tip of the Americas, our first goal before entering the Atlantic, sailing northwards to the 50ºS, and then back to the Falkland Islands. Making our way towards the Cape, and barely a couple of hundred miles north of our current position, lies Point Nemo, its whereabouts lost in the middle of the immensity of the Pacific, representing the remotest spot in the planet’s oceans—the furthest point from any landmass.

To get here, about 3,000 miles are behind us since we set sail from New Zealand, and still a fairly similar amount remains before reaching our next port.

And as we gain miles towards the east, there are changes too in the times when we see the sun rise or set. Besides the International Date Line that we crossed a few days ago, the vast South Pacific extends over 8 time zones. To adapt our time as we cross them, every week we lose an hour on our clocks. So far, they have gone ahead 4 times, and 4 more times we will have to keep changing them before our arrival in the Falklands.