Mon Jul 19 2021
I must sound like a broken record. I simply can’t get over how well our Seawind 1160 scoots along in very light airs. It’s also fair to say that flat water really helps, but light airs and flat water often go together unless a recent disturbance has churned things up. We’ve got about 800 miles to go and the forecast for the coming week is very encouraging, but it’s also very light in places. Hopefully there’s enough diesel onboard so we don’t get stuck out here waiting for a weather change, which can only get worse. Nothing scary on the horizon and we want to beat feet for dry land before that changes.
This afternoon I was so amazed at how well we’re going I had to take some pictures of the chart plotter image. We shook out the reefs this morning and have been sailing with the full main and jib all day. The wind has slowly tapered down from 10-12 knots to 6 - 8, and sometimes less. This afternoon after things had been steady for a while we were sailing at 4.5 knots SOG with 6.3 knots of true wind just slightly aft of the port beam, and apparent wind 56 degrees at 8.1 knots. STW showed 4.2 knots, and it’s impossible to calibrate the darn thing so I’m pretty sure we weren’t looking at any significant current effects. Just amazing.
I keep harping on how light air performance is critical in a cruising sailboat. Trade winds should be referred to as “betray winds”. We’re heavily loaded with provisions and spares and cruising machinery, AND we’ve got a starboard bow that looks kind of like a blob with a fish net holding it together. I never would have guessed we could sail this well in these circumstances and conditions. No wonder Seawind cats are so popular with the cruiser / racer folks - they can get up and go in a wide variety of conditions. Nuff said.
Hopefully we’ve pretty much shifted gears from extreme apprehension about our damaged boat back to the mundane life of long distance passage making. Mostly studying the weather forecast, deciding on a strategy to get home the fastest and safest way, asking what’s for breakfast, plotting up other cruisers in the area (they’re the canaries in the coal mine so to speak), asking what’s for lunch. Next up a nap, then looking around for what broke today or is about to break (nice to have some warning), writing up the log, making maintenance notes, reading a bit, asking what’s for dinner. After dinner sending out a daily passage status to friends and family, writing up something strange to post on our PredictWind tracking page, wondering what sort of snacks we’ve got in the pantry, then downloading weather, reviewing the weather, deciding upon an updated strategy to get home fast, read a bit, do the dishes, wake Isabel up for her watch, go to bed. Get up around 0730, rinse and repeat. Boring. Just the way we like it.
One thing is for sure, and Jamie Gifford of SV Totem gets credit for warning us about it. Long passages break stuff. Given enough time, chafing problems will reveal themselves. Mechanical fasteners will work themselves loose. Electrical corrosion will rear its ugly head. Sails weakened by UV exposure will go boom. Blocks will break and may eat a halyard in the process. Squeaks we never heard before will try to make us crazy. We prepare the best we can, we eliminate squeaks that could annoy us into insanity, we stock spares, then we inspect, inspect, inspect and hope to trap a problem before something disastrous happens. A few weeks ago our pals on SV Omaha, a couple from Finland, left French Polynesia for Reunion Island expecting to be at sea 100 days. They broke a main boom a few days ago, quite a disaster. Hopefully they’ve hatched a solution and I think they’ve got a welder and material on board. Perhaps Australia will allow them to stop for repairs, though they’ll have to declare an emergency and quarantine and all that.
Like Kurt Russell said in the movie Captain Ron, “if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen out here”.
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