Well, Hanalei Bay on the North side of Kauai is somewhere we could just live. Of course we’d have to take up surfing, and we might need to find a few million bucks to purchase a dwelling, but wow, what a beautiful place. Friendly folks, great groceries, beautiful sandy beach, sandy surf breaks rather than coral reefs to eat your lunch - what’s not to like?
We ended up with a bit of a Northerly swell for several days and some of the surf breaks that normally only work in the Winter time were working well. There must have been hundreds of surfers out and about. Tourists were everywhere, the bars and restaurants were packed. There were around 30 boats in the bay when we arrived, but in the last 3 days boats have been blasting off for Alaska or the Puget Sound or wherever. We’ve all been looking at the weather patterns and waiting for the Pacific high pressure system to get well established and stabilized. It looks as if things are finally settling down and that is pretty much the consensus of other sailors as is evidenced by the migration North.
We’re expecting a lot of light winds on this passage, as well as a fair amount of downwind sailing. While at the Hawaii Yacht Club we did our best to patch up our tired performance laminate screecher - a wonderful sail for lighter airs on a beam reach. It turns out when the fabric begins to delaminate it’s a sign the sail is done, but with luck we’ll get a few days out of it before it becomes confetti. We made numerous repairs to the dinghy and other bits and pieces, and when we left we felt we were ready for the expected 3000 mile journey.
We rigged our dual headsail setup a couple days ago, so today when we departed the bay we turned deep downwind to enjoy the spectacular Napali coast and we rolled out the twin headsails, separated them with the barber haulers and voila, downwind we went at about 45% of the true wind speed. English folks call it a twizzle rig, some call it a simbo rig; regardless it’s a great way to go downwind - effortless, easy to manage, and allows us to maintain a heading to a destination rather than jibe back and forth. Catamarans don’t do wing and wing with the main and jib - at least ours doesn’t.
Once we were satisfied we had the twin headsail rig sorted we turned into the wind and raised the main with a single reef, and then were off to the races at 8.5 knots in an 18 knot breeze. After a couple hours the wind tapered off and we shook out the reef and now are tooling along nicely at about 7 knots with 13 knots of wind a bit forward of the beam. It’s a clear night and there stars should be spectacular. Isabel prepared a killer chicken curry for dinner and now she’s crashed, so I’m on until around 0100 ships time.
Isabel baked 3 fruitcakes for healthful snacking, and she’s convinced that if we have to abandon ship to the life raft we could live for weeks on fruitcake. Sounds good to me.
Fingers crossed for an uneventful passage - somewhere around 21 days. We’ll end up in Ketchikan or Port Townsend or somewhere . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment