It would be dishonest of me to suggest that this trip is not getting old. In truth with a working autopilot it would be a lot more relaxing, even fun. But hand steering has made it into a lot of work with sore muscles, not quite enough sleep all around and very little time with all four people awake and alert together.
.But we are approaching the end, we are less than 400 miles out from the Marquesas and should be making landfall some time this weekend. On the other hand the winds are dropping and have gone East which has made the sailing morechallenging.
Without the spinnaker up today’s conditions 10-12 knots from almost due East, would be mostly intolerable. We know this because we experienced them last night. Without a lot of wind in the sails and while trying to sail deep the waves have their way with you. This rolls you a lot, and exacerbates the light wind problem because the constant movement off of waves collapses the already limp sails. Even with yesterday’s spinnaker work last night was so slow we still put up our worst day yet 162 miles.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, tonight we are planning to be most un-seamanlike. Rather than flogging the life out of our sails to make five knots off the wind we are probably going to fire up the engine, point the boat more West, and get ourselves set up for a faster day of spinnaker reaching tomorrow. It isn’t our first choice, but tonight we’re not going to put the wear on the sails again either. So after a day of saltier-than-thou spinnaker sailing in light air, we are now putting up with the infernal racket of the engine for a few hours against the hope of better sailing tomorrow.
We’ve come 2,658 miles as of the last hour, all but about 10 of those under sail.
One Comment
Just fly the bloody kite at night! If you guys w rap it, gybe the boat and wait. It’ll unwrap itself eventually.