Wind Messing With Us Some More
For a while yesterday the wind disappeared and we powered up the engine and actually made progress directly the way we wanted to go ? one mile forward = one mile closer to our destination. How unusual.
But it wasn’t to last, around midnight ship’s time the wind started to pick up. Direction? Do I even need to tell you it was straight from the way we were headed?
When it reached the 20’s and the waves got larger we were no longer making good progress under power and had to sail. Back to heeling and banging, no one got a good night’s sleep.
The wind persisted all day, though as the day draws to a close it has faded to 8-10 knots. With all the chop from 18+ hours of wind trying to beat into that light air is not very productive, so we are now ?Motor Slogging? straight at the mark until either 1) it gets flat and the waves go away 2) the wind shifts to the Southeast as was predicted and we can sail again or 3) the wind picks back up and we’re back to pounding upwind some more
The downside is that our chances of arrival in Opua during daylight hours tomorrow have slimmed to near nothing. Yesterday we were on a pace for an arrival mid-day to early afternoon, but in 18 hours of upwind sailing today we only closed about 60-70 actual miles of distance for the 100 or so that we sailed.
As of this writing (about 7:15 pm local NZ time, I think) we are still 142 miles from the waypoint outside the Bay of Islands and some 152 miles from the Customs Dock in Opua. If the wind doesn’t mess with us again we can cover that in less than 24 hours which may or may not be early enough to get cleared into the country. Hopefully it will at least be light enough to get us to the customs dock where we can tie up and stop moving until the officials show up.
But we’ll see. It’s still light now, so it should be light twenty-four hours from now!
Albatrosses ? Finally!
If you read books like Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey series you get the impression that ships sailing far out in the ocean do so through clouds of Albatrosses. Perhaps a couple of hundred years ago there were that many, but we’ve been waiting for one for over two weeks.
We did see some Albatrosses in the Galapagos, but that was a local species that nests there and we didn’t see them flying.
Today we were finally treated to some. It wasn’t clear if it was one albatross that kept making huge circles or half a dozen but we finally got a good look at these magnificent birds.
I don’t think I saw a single wing flap. With their slim, high aspect wings that look to be about 6-8 feet in span they are fantastic gliders ? sweeping across the waves, wheeling around and gliding with nary a hint of effort.
We’d been hoping for one to follow us but that wasn’t to be, but they were a fine sight this morning and perked us up tremendously.
And Whales?
Oh yeah, and we saw a pod of what we believe to be Pilot whales.
We had stopped ? hove-to ? to recover a horseshoe buoy and bracket that had been swept loose by the waves. While Will was fetching this in we noticed a large group of black birds wheeling very close to us. We figured there must have been some fish there but we couldn’t see them breaking.
Unfortunately it wasn’t until we’d set sail again and were leaving the flock behind that we noticed the whale fins at the surface! We could still see them clearly but we were headed away and accelerating on the wind. Smallish black whales, I saw four surface at once.
If only we’d noticed them when we were stopped practically in the middle of them!
