Well, we’ve got wind. Lots of it. But its not necessarily a ?happy? wind.
There are some welcome winds and some unwelcome winds, all having to do with the characteristics of how boats sail. Cruisers have a very different attitude about some of these winds than racing sailors might. Racers relish the challenging conditions. Cruisers are known to sail hundreds of miles out of the way or stay in port waiting to avoid the Unhappy zones.
The Unhappy Wind Zones
The ?Unhappy? zones on a sailboat are as follows. If you picture a cone from the front of the boat covering about a 90 degree arc that is the Upwind area. When you point your boat at your destination and the wind is from a direction in that cone you are unhappy. This is because you can’t sail straight upwind. So you have to zig and zag across the wind, and this sort of sailing makes your boat heel a lot. The closer to the wind you go the more you heel and the harder it is for an autopilot to stay on course. Living on a 20-30 degree angle and bouncing around a lot makes everything a challenge, from cooking and sleeping to using the heads (restrooms). The upwind Unhappy Zone is more the Really Unhappy Zone.
The other ?Unhappy? zone is a cone of about 90 degrees behind the boat. Again when you are pointed at your destination and the wind is from here you have to do more work. Sailing straight down wind is really slow and can be dangers, since you might accidently jibe which slams your boom from one side of the boat to the other. Also the sails in the front of the boat get blanketed by the main sail and aren’t too effective unless we take extra steps. So again, you have to sail less down wind so the front sails can do some work, which is away from your destination and all over the place. In addition sailing deep down wind with waves can be very frustrating with the rolling unpleasant motion that slams equipment around and backwinds sails to slow you down.
Racers deal with this in a couple of ways. Going upwind they take all the crew that aren’t actively doing anything and make them sit up on the high side of the boat to flatten it out. Except for off shore distance racing this isn’t so bad since most races don’t last for more than a couple of hours. Doing downwind they deal with more complicated sail arrangements ? spinnakers and the like. When I had a race boat we sailed with 10 or 11 people to handle these tasks.
Cruising?we have four of us. And we’re out here 24×7 hundreds of miles from land. We don’t like to take chances by making complicated sail arrangements. So we don’t fly spinnakers at night and we tend to do things like reef the sails (make them smaller) ahead of the dark so we don’t get caught up short by unexpected conditions.
The Happy Zones
Those are the rest of them, conditions known as ?Reaching?. There is Close reaching with the wind to the forward but not ?Upwind?, Beam reaching, where the wind is roughly perpendicular to the boat, and broad reaching with the wind aft but still to the side.
All of these are fast, pretty comfortable and pretty easy to manage. Most importantly ? these zones let you point your boat where you are trying to go and sail there in a straight line.
We like these zone, and we seek them out.
The Last 36 Hours
Heading from Tahiti to New Zealand is a trip that is mostly Southwest to one degree or another. For prevailing wind purposes it is recommended to sail West a lot with some South motion, but to approach New Zealand from the North to account for the prevailing conditions near shore.
We have been attempting to do this.
The wind has been attempting to prevent this.
We started sailing again a couple of days ago with the wind behind us (?Aft Unhappy Zone?) with a good amount of breeze from the East. Enough wind to go fast while still having to zig and zag a bit to keep our Westerly travel and not head South to early.
Then the wind got light from the Aft Irritating Zone. Bring on the rolling and banging. In the middle of the night it actually swung to the North and spent a few hours in a Happy Zone, where I got to point the boat right where I wanted to and sail straight to my next mark.
Around dawn the wind got stronger and moved to the Northwest, closer to the Forward Annoying Zone. We headed down, then realized we had to douse the staysail if we wanted to keep heading West.
A couple of hours later a squall blew up and the wind shifted to the West (the Tick Me Right the Frack Off Zone) and got strong, gusting to over 30 knots. We now had to reef sails more and sail WAY off course from where we want to go. To add to the fun currents have been pushing us South, so we’ve been able at best to sail a little West of due South, when we really want to travel West.
You know, right where the wind is coming from.
So today has been hours of bouncy, tippy slow sailing in mostly the wrong direction. At least the rain stopped.
The good news is the wind is supposed to shift soon to start blowing right from New Zealand. Fortunately we are still more than 1,000 miles away and have plenty of sea room to zig and zag all over the South Pacific in the hope that the rather absent Southeasterly Trades will come back.
Its all part of sailing and making passages, but some parts are a lot more fun than others. The weather though is still decent, clear and not stormy and there aren’t any nasty storms out there, so I shouldn’t vent too much.
