Milestones ? The Date Line
So we are officially over the International Dateline, although I must confess that this is because if jigs way East here to keep New Zealand all on the same day. So its now tomorrow here.
What does that mean on Evenstar? Not much, we tend to keep our local time unchanged until we get where we are going, though I do need to keep in mind the true date and time of course. But now it is Saturday outside the boat and will be when we update the clocks on arrival.
Unlike crossing the equator there aren’t any time honored rituals to obey, although apparently the seaman of old DID enjoy getting a day’s pay without having to work for it.
Still Going Upwind
This is slow. It is slow not because our boatspeed is slow, but rather because the wind has been from the West or Southwest for several days. This means we really can’t sail the direction we want to go.
Also there are some ocean currents which are not always favorable, in fact they affect your ability to closer to where you want to go as well.
We want to head Southwest, that is the direction to New Zealand. To do this, we must obvious sail South, and also sail West. Obviously the best way to do this is to sail South and West simultaneously, but we can not.
Our options are, with the current, are to either:
1) Sail West, while drifting a bit to the North and away from NZ, or
2) Sail South, which actually is East of South, thereby also sending us a but more East
Part of the problem of course is us, we aren’t sailing the boat like a race boat, trimmed to upwind within an inch of its life and hand steering every mile. We can’t, it’s exhausting and counter productive. We need to keep it a little cracked off from ?Max Point? upwind sailing, which allows the autopilot to sail the boat and us to get some sleep. So we’re tacking the boat through 100-110 degrees, not the 90 degrees the boat is really capable of. That 10-20 degrees slows us down when the wind is right from where we want to go.
The other problem is the current.
Ocean currents, unlike coastal currents, are quite insidious because you can’t see them too easily. Around the coasts you have tides, you can see current dragging on marks, current lines that form on shallow bottom contours, surface roils from the contours of the bottom and shore, things float by you that you can note current on, etc. etc.
Where we’re sailing it is 3-4 miles deep, there are no ?contours? on the bnottom to roil up the surface ? all the water looks like it is simply not moving. There really isn’t much floating around out here besides us, either. We’ve not seen another boat since we left Tahiti. But the water is moving, and in directions you can only see when your speed falls off or increases or your ability to sail in a certain direction is weirdly impeded.
We do have weather files downloaded that purport to tell us where these currents are and which way they are headed. If they are as accurate as the wind, right now they are near meaningless.
So we keep plugging away, our progress is slow but it is progress ? we will get there eventually. If the wind would shift we’d get there a whole lot faster though.
