Day 19, Sunday 8th July. 44-42N, 177-48W. Daily Run: 122 NM. Weather: 5 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2220 NM to go
Another dull day at the office, actually, I’m so engrossed in the program I’m writing that I sometimes forget I’m on a boat in the middle of a big ocean. The weather improved a little yesterday afternoon and we got some sailing in, but the rolling was still a problem, by morning today we had good wind, and the rolling was slight, however the fog has rolled back in, heavy this time and the wind has dropped to less than 5 knots, and we are wallowing around. I have started the engine as the solar panels don’t generate very much in these conditions. I’m very conscious of how much fuel we are using on the engine and the heating, so I’m keeping the revs low, unfortunately this is not good for the engine. Yesterday was fun, we passed the International dateline, we put our calendars back by a day, so instead of being Sunday afternoon, it became Saturday afternoon. Then we moved the clocks forward by 2 hours to American Samoa Time, this seems like a good time zone for us. so now we are 11 hours behind UTC/GMT. I wish the phone allowed me to schedule alarms using UTC, now all my alarms for wx fax and BBC news are 2 hours early.
The AIS/GPS unit duly showed us reaching 180deg East, then flipped to 179 deg West in a second.
Earlier this morning we crossed the halfway mark, Kathy was asleep and I was on watch, this is an arbitrary point as it’s difficult to measure the distance that we halved, is it the distance we should travel, i.e. the perfect route, or the distance we have travelled and an estimate of how far our destination is away. In the end I measured the route we planned over ground and have divided it by two, and used that distance from our destination as the halfway mark which is 2297 miles
Our daily run of 122 is ok considering the weather, it would be over 130 if we hadn’t lost the 2 hours.
Yesterday we saw 2 ships passing, amazingly one had to change course to give us a wide berth!
Paul Collister
Author: paulcollister
Day 18, Sun 8th July. 32-39N, 179-45E. Daily Run: 128 NM. Weather: 5-10 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2343 NM to go
Day 18, Sunday 8th July. 32-39N, 179-45E. Daily Run: 128 NM. Weather: 5-10 Knots S, damp & foggy. 2343 NM to go
A miserable 24 hours where the high pressure system went walkabout, and walked right up to us and is now sitting on us with a barometer reading of 1030, the chart actually has the centre at 1036, so we are a little bit out from there. Often high pressure brings with it lovely conditions, clear sunny skies, light breezes etc, but sometimes, like today it brings damp miserable fog. The winds are light and we have two wave trains, one from the SE and one from the SW, One gives us a gentle roll, the other is slamming us around, together the boat either gets off lightly, or gets pushed badly. This is like being in a rolly anchorage, but it’s been going on for 24 hours now, with no sign of stopping. Saying that, as I type, some sunshine has just broken through, lets hope this is the start of better weather. There is still a gale a few hundred mile to the north, but in retrospect, we would have done better to get closer to it.
I have been doing very minor chores, and last night I had a go at programming, and to my delight I found I can hack a few hours at the keyboard without any feelings of nausea. This is great, so I have been developing an app on my MacBook and quite enjoying it.
We ran the engine this morning for 6 hours as the sun wasn’t getting through the fog, also we are going crazy today and having showers, so the engine will heat up the hot water nicely.
In a couple of hours we cross the international date line, people often do something to celebrate this, but we won’t, I think they are getting confused with the equator. We will just watch the GPS showing us going from East to West, partly for fun, but partly because if there was going to be a glitch in the GPS software, this would be when it shows up, it must be a scenario that’s difficult to test in the lab. I still find it difficult to get around the day gain, I expect tomorrows blog will be Day 19, Sunday. This is getting to be a bit like ‘a month of sundays’ If I head back this way I lose the day I gained, but I’m wondering about that, today I gain 6 hours of Saturday and 14 hours of Sunday, but if I head back I may gain different parts of different days all together. It gets very confusing. For tax purposes, does this count as an extra day out of the country?
Kathy was delighted to hear from her family via email that England can actually win football matches, growing up in England, we always thought that having invented the game we were also brilliant at it, not so really. My brothers know a lot more than me on the subject, but I seem to recall we haven’t won this trophy since The Beatles were still gigging, and I have heard people say that if the ref had had his specs on, we might not have won that game.
We are almost half way, I think that will call for a small celebration.
Paul Collister
Day 17, 7th July. 42-35N, 177-13E. Daily Run: 135 NM. Weather: 8-10 Knots S, Sunny & fresh. 2471 NM to go
Day 17, 7th July. 42-35N, 177-13E. Daily Run: 135 NM. Weather: 8-10 Knots S, Sunny & fresh. 2471 NM to go
Another quiet day and night, the wind was decent through the night and we managed a daily run of 135 NM which isn’t too bad given we are in quite weak winds. This morning has the winds picking up a little so I’m hoping for a better run by this time tomorrow. We are now riding on the isobars of the Pacific High (Counterpart to the Azores High), the last few days have been spent getting through a little ridge that was pushing out of the high and giving us the light winds. We are mostly past that now, and I have slightly changed course so that we are aiming just north of the great circle path to Seattle to reach about 50deg N at about 165 deg E. But this keeps changing as the high pressure system moves around.
This morning required the spinnaker pole to be hoisted to support the genoa, given the light winds now coming over the stern quarter of the boat, this took forever, there are just so many ropes to route, uphaul, forward stay, aft stay, sheet, preventer for the main, which gets in the way, mast track uphaul and downhaul. I thought I had a decent system but it took ages to do today, and that was with it being calm.
Everything else is working just fine, we are getting enough solar power to keep everything running, with just about a 50% discharge on the battery each night. With a bit more wind on the turbine, that will reduce to about 40% I hope. Even less if we use the wind vane steering.
Kathy continues to produce wonderful meals, which become more important as time passes on as they are usually the highlight of the day. If we continue to keep with this high for the next 2 weeks, then not a lot is going to happen, so mealtimes are always something to look forward to. I finished my book about sailing from Seattle to Alaska, a good read and I hope to visit many of the places mentioned, but not the final beach, for reasons I can’t mention until Kathy has read the book.
We haven’t found a destination in Seattle yet, I like the sound of the Fishermans Terminal, mentioned in the book above, but the book is old, and I don’t know if that is even an option now. I emailed a few marinas before we left, but received no reply. I think we will stop at Port Angeles, which is the first big looking marina I can see on the chart and hope they have a visitor berth for us so we can check in there. They didn’t reply to my email either. However, after 5-6 weeks at sea, it won’t really matter if we have to drift around the Strait of Juan de Fuca / Seattle area for a day or two until we find somewhere. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here, we still two and a half thousand miles to go, hopefully tomorrow we pass the international date line when we move from the exotic East to the old West of the world and a day or two later we pass the halfway mark.
Paul Collister.
Day 16, 6th July. 41-27N, 174-36E. Daily Run: 125 NM. Weather: 5 Knots S, Sunny, Calm. 2606 NM to go
Day 16, 6th July. 41-27N, 174-36E. Daily Run: 125 NM. Weather: 5 Knots S, Sunny, Calm. 2606 NM to go
Not a lot to report I’m afraid, the wind stayed solid for most of the last 24 hours, but from about 5AM it started to drop, it seems the low I was worried about has filled and moved further north than predicted. This means we are left sitting on the edge of a high pressure system, with very little wind. On the plus side it’s very calm and the sun is shining. Earlier I called Kathy to come and look at a shark that was meandering past us. All you could see was the fin doing a zigzagging, just like in the movies !
Yesterday, nothing broke and nothing was fixed. The boats pretty good now.
The last of the Japanese sliced bread went yesterday and we have started heating up vacuum packed Nan and Pitta bread. Kathy will start cooking some fresh bread, once we pass the halfway mark, as then I feel confident we won’t run out of gas. Kathy managed to make a lovely tortilla for dinner last night and I found several more bags of mini kit-kats that will keep me going until we get to America.
I have changed course to take us more north, hopefully we will pick up a bit of wind later. We managed a 125 NM run yesterday, which isn’t bad considering the light winds, we are just about making 5 knots right now, hopefully that will improve later today. For those non nautical, 5 knots (Nautical miles per hour) is just shy of 6 Mph (Miles per hour).
I have attached a sat pic of the weather, the star in the middle is roughly where we are, just under the low pressure swirl of a cloud you can see.
Paul Collister
Week Two
Week Two
It’s been a week of ups and downs…and side-to-sides, and pushing and shoving. Paul has described the sea state in his weather reports, along with the meteorological reasons and explanations for the rough conditions. I prefer to focus on the drama such weather created. There’s only so much you can do with words to get across how dramatic it was/still is, at times. When it began to get choppier, I carried on regardless, remembering how I dealt with this type of thing on the Atlantic crossing. I adopted the stances I used then, such as standing with feet placed well apart, body leaning against the sides and moving with the motion of the waves when preparing food or cooking in the galley, which feels a lot more graceful than it looks I suspect. A golden rule is never to try to do things with two hands – make sure one is always holding on to the many wooden ‘hand-holds’ dotted around the boat (otherwise it won’t end well). I had even got a bit blasé about it all because I had learned to sense when a convenient lull in the rocking was imminent simply through getting used to the rhythm of the waves. This would allow for a quick ‘letting go’ to carry out a two-handed task such as chopping veg or doing dishes. So far, so familiar then.
Gradually the force of the wind and waves increased, bringing with them some alarming noises and a motion that I found scary and extremely difficult to move around in, let alone do anything more ambitious than inch my way to the toilet with my back against the wall. A couple of days before the worst of it, I had prepared and cooked some tasty evening meals, and got on with daily routine stuff with only the odd annoying jerk or jolt to catch me unawares. By Saturday (30th June) I had written in my journal that it was becoming hard to sleep with all the rolling, and that movement was more restricted so we were reading and dozing a lot more during the day. It began to feel chillier, too and the sky was grey and foggy with drizzly rain falling. We put the heating on for longer intervals and played offline scrabble on Paul’s iPhone; all very cosy and the speed we were doing showed we would reach our destination a week earlier than expected. I helped Paul to change the sail set up that afternoon, which was pretty hairy with the boat listing from side to side at such sharp angles. I felt sure one of us would get tossed over the side but even that fear couldn’t detract from the spectacular sight of the Albatrosses circling around us. They were beautiful, and so huge! I’m almost sure they were Albatrosses but I could be wrong. In an effort to picture them, I found myself smiling while remembering a Monty Python sketch which features John Cleese selling Albatross as a cinema snack instead of choc ices. I also wondered how the Ancient Mariner could have been so cruel as to shoot such a lovely bird.
July dawned with the roughest day yet, and a realisation that this was a much more challenging passage than the Atlantic crossing. Sitting in the cabin I could see and hear the water crashing into the cockpit. The waves had reached about 4 metres in height and the swell was strong. The wind was also strong and the boat was hurtling through this turbulent sea (it resembled the state water looks like when boiling in a pan) at breakneck speed. The difference from any other sea state I’ve experienced was that the waves were coming from all directions, so that it was like sitting on one of those ‘bucking bronco’ machines whose main aim is to throw you onto the floor. Sunday’s journal entry plaintively and somewhat melodramatically states that ‘moving and staying upright now requires a good deal of planning, motivation and effort’. Earlier I said that it’s hard to put words together to convey how trying it was, but some of the words and phrases that came to mind as I sat there being reassured by Paul that this was nothing to worry about might help: pitching, tossing, corkscrewing, plunging, slamming, banging, crashing, bouncing, ‘being lifted off the seat’ ‘high walls of water’, waves breaking over the top of the boat, listing from side to side at speed…you get the picture. We didn’t eat much that day, but hadn’t done much to work up an appetite anyway. The only thing to do was sit it out below while Paul carried out regular weather forecasts. I have to confess I’m a touch sceptical about these forecasts, but looking at the complicated weather charts and faxes as they come through made me think you need a degree in meteorology to make sense of them.
Neither of us got seasick I’m pleased to say, and difficult as it was I’m still feeling good about the whole thing. I think much of my concerns come from not having the knowledge that Paul has about the level of danger. The loud noises and the turbulence in a storm at sea serve to make it seem more alarming than it actually is. It’s also frustrating being rendered immobile when things need doing and the thought of the whole journey being like that was disturbing to say the least. In the end I did what I always do to escape in stressful times – read! We take turns choosing music to listen to in the evenings, and I have come to appreciate more of Paul’s choices (as long as it’s not cello music or Ivor Cutler). I think he now enjoys Neil Young because he hasn’t described him as ‘whingey’ lately 😉 . The World Service provides the only source of news we get, but is sadly lacking in its World Cup coverage so I have to rely on emails about how England are doing. We’ve also listened to some entertaining old podcasts from radios 4 and 6. I’m looking forward to picking up the American radio stations when we get closer.
Things have been a lot more calm and pleasant for the last two days. I’m back to creating meals from our vast store of provisions and have been recording details of our evening meals to include in a separate blog entry later on.
We’ve changed time zones again and are now another hour ahead, in Noumea time (New Caledonia). Paul tells me we’ll be crossing the international dateline in a few days’ time and will gain a day (in Groundhog Day fashion?). I really can’t get my head around it but it will be interesting to experience when it happens (or maybe not). We were a thousand miles from anywhere yesterday, and today we are 37% of the way across. I do enjoy those sort of statistics and facts, and still like to study the route and progress on the electronic charts. We’ve only been alerted to three other vessels in the last week so we really are ‘alone on a wide wide sea’ (another apt line from ‘The Ancient Mariner’). We did, however, finally see some whales and dolphins this morning. It was worth being called out of my warm cocoon to see them. The whales were too far away to see properly but their size and spouts distinguished them from dolphins.
We head into week three with good winds predicted to push us along and with gales and hurricanes far enough away to cause us no great alarm. The main concern at the moment is that we’ve almost run out of bread and Paul would prefer to wait until next week before we use any large amount of gas to bake any. Luckily we have plenty of longlife naan and pitta breads and tortilla wraps to see us through. Just hope it’s not too rocky when the time comes for mixing, kneading and proving dough.
Kathy
Day 15, 5th July. 40-48N, 172-00E. Daily Run: 90 NM. Weather: 10 Knots SE, Sunny, Fresh. 2727 NM to go
Day 15, 5th July. 40-48N, 172-00E. Daily Run: 90 NM. Weather: 10 Knots SE, Sunny, Fresh. 2727 NM to go
Yesterday was very calm, no wind at all, so a day for drifting and doing jobs. I dropped the sails to stop the clanking and flapping and turned the engine off for the afternoon. The sea had calmed but there where still enough waves/swell to keep the boat rocking and rolling. It was a day for jobs, I went around the boat checking for chafe and damage. At the bow I found the anchor rubbing on the whisker stay, there was a bit of plastic there to prevent this, but it had slid out of the way. Next we unrolled the genoa and I climbed the mast a little to reach the clew, where the sheets are attached, I moved the bowline knots a couple of inches along to move the chafe point out of the ring in the sail. There wasn’t any chafe as such, but a distinct compression of the rope, I hope this will be good for the rest of the passage now. I had noticed the topping lift was getting difficult to use, on this boat the boom and sail are too heavy to lift by puling the topping lift by hand at the mast, and the boat came with a block and tackle 4:1 at the rear of the boom, that connects to the usual topping lift. The topping lift is used to lift the boom up in the air when putting sails up, so the sail can be tensioned without the weight of the boom pulling it down. It also helps a lot when reefing. Anyway one of the blocks had smashed its sheave. My fault I’m sure, as I’m often cranking in the main, when the topping lift isn’t slack enough and putting a lot of strain on it. That was fixed, but I noticed I’m getting low on blocks now. The schoolboy wooden box for bits and pieces that fell off the pedestal was cobbled back together and tied to the pedestal, that’s better than having nothing and a box flying around the cockpit sole. Finally I fitted bungee cord to Kathy’s bookshelf in the hope it will stop her books doing kamikaze dives on each big wave.
Later in the evening there was a few knots of wind, so I raised the mainsail to see if that might help stop the rolling while we slowly motored east, however the sail jammed. This has happened before and my temp repair had failed, as I expected it to. Basically the top runner for the head of the sail is attached to the metal plate at the sails head with woven tape, however the slot in the plate has right angle edges that are perfect for cutting fabric, which they have done, twice now. I repaired it with new tape and doubled up on it. It can break when it’s up fine, it’s only a problem when raising the sail. I need to take a file, or maybe the dremmel is the answer, to the metal and round off the edges. I also need to write to Rolly Tasker, the sailmaker and point out the problem with their sail design/construction. After all that, the main only flapped itself to death and had to come down again.
So for the night we ran with the engine ticking over, making 3 knots east, for no other reason than the fact I can’t sleep when we are drifting aimlessly. We saw one ship yesterday, Closest point of approach (CPA) was 5 NM
6AM this morning and I popped on deck to check all was well and was delighted to see a huge school of dolphins all around the boat and many more further away, then a few hundred metres in front of the boat I saw two big whales coasting along, very gracefully, making a heck of a speed too. The sea was calm and the sun had not long risen on a clear sky. It was quite a magical scene. The wind was slowly building and by 7AM I had the main up and the genoa out and we are close hauled making a healthy 6 knots in 10 knots of wind over a lovely calm sea.
The forecasts show that a deepish low is moving up on us and will meet the pacific high around the same time as us, the charts have the word ‘GALE’ over the convergence area where the low pushes into the high. 30-40 knot winds are forecast, and I guess big waves too. My plan is to try to stay south of this, and at the moment I’m plucking 42deg North as the highest latitude I should go. Once the low has passed we will turn to the north (NE) and follow it’s tail through and pass north of the high and onto our destination. That’s the plan anyway. There’s plenty of typhoon activity over near Japan right now and a hurricane off Mexico, but where we are we should be very safe and out of their reach.
At midday here, the wind has picked up to a good 10-12 knots and we are flying along. Today marks our 2nd week at sea, these two weeks seem to have flown by, in the next few days we hope to reach the halfway mark.
Paul Collister
PS I had the wrong title for yesterdays blog, should have been day 14
Day 15, 4th July. 40-11N, 170-12E. Daily Run: 116 NM. Weather: 2–5 Knots Northerly, Sunny, very calm. 2816 NM to go
Day 15, 4th July. 40-11N, 170-12E. Daily Run: 116 NM. Weather: 2–5 Knots Northerly, Sunny, very calm. 2816 NM to go
As expected the winds dropped last night, and by this morning we were becalmed. However for most of the night, despite only having winds of about 6 – 8 knots we were able to put in a decent daily run of 116NM, however by 10AM the wind had gone completely, leaving the sails hopelessly flapping, the boat and more annoyingly the boom rolling from side to side, driving me nuts. So down came the sails and on went the engine, just low revs, enough to keep us moving along at about 4 knots. I wanted the excuse of giving the batteries a good charge with the engine, but the sun has come out now and we are getting all the juice we could ever want.
So we are pushing ahead, I’m getting better at reading the weather charts, and the ones I get from Hawaii are great at seeing the bigger picture. It seems the low that was giving us so much trouble has headed of to the NE now, and we are in-between it and the pacific high, but far away from both such that we aren’t seeing much wind. As we head NE towards our goal, we will be squeezed between the high and low and should see some very good winds, If I keep towards the high, the winds should be less and more pleasant. We shall see. Hopefully we won’t have many more calm days like today ahead.
What did we break in the last 24 hours section: Well, when I put the mainsail up yesterday, I noticed a lot of black marks on it, most disappointing as it was squeaky clean new white before. It seems when I dropped the sail in the night, I hadn’t noticed that the reefed bottom section, that hung over the side of the boom had got trapped under the boom, squashed against the gallows. The gallows are a trestle like arrangement that the boom sits in, just forward of the cockpit, and stop it swinging around. The cutout in the gallows had previously been covered in some kind of black rubber/leather to protect the boom, now for a couple of days it had been rubbing against the sail. Looking at it today in sunlight, it may only be cosmetic damage. I topped up the engine oil today, something I haven’t done on the move for a long time and let the oil funnel roll over and drip on one of the cockpit cushions, stupid I know, and I only mention it because Kathy thinks if I’m going to mention spilt pot noodles I should also cover my own spilling mistakes.
More importantly, what did we fix in the last 24 hours. Well first off I dismantled the connectors and cable harness behind the steering pedestal. The Garmin chart plotter and the bow thruster conectors were caked in salt and grime, so I cleaned them up and sure enough they are both working fine again. This time I have bagged them up and I don’t think they will be affected by spray again. I will build a little compartment to house them at some point. Next onto the water maker. I suspected the supply of salt water to be the issue, and on checking there was no water in the fine pre-filter to the system. It seems the pressure pump wasn’t able to draw water up from the hull and through the filter. I have bypassed the filter, so the water travels straight from the thru hull to the primary raw filter to the high pressure pump, I think I’m reasonably safe doing this out here where there will be little to get sucked in. This solved the problem and so far today I have made 12 litres of water, not a lot, but not bad for a couple of hours running. As it stands we aren’t using enough water to need the machine. The calm weather has allowed me to transfer 40 litres of Diesel from the cans on deck to the tank, giving us a full tank, and 40 litres reserve on deck. Hopefully we won’t use more than 30 litres today to get past this calm spot, then the rest is for emergencies and touchdown. Yesterday, due to a very grey few days, the battery hadn’t reached 100% recharge, so I decided to move back to the Monitor wind vane steering, with my dodgey chain repair in place I set it up to steer us on a course of about 70deg True. It worked really well and ran for about 15 hours before the wind had dropped so low it couldn’t cope. I have attached a picture of what happens to your course when both crew sleep and leave the driving to a machine in low wind!
The previous bad weather had thrown all of Kathy’s books off her bookshelf and they were piled up in a terrible mess behind the bookcase windows, now I have to devise some mechanism to keep them in place, I have bungee cord and a toolbox, so off we go. Last nights calms allowed Kathy to do some proper cooking and we had a lovely meal, as close as we ever get to a Sunday roast onboard!
Paul Collister.
Day 13, 3rd July. 39-20N, 168-57E. Daily Run: 85 NM. Weather: 10-15 Knots Northerly, 2935 NM to go
Day 13, 3rd July. 39-20N, 168-57E. Daily Run: 85 NM. Weather: 10-15 Knots Northerly, 2935 NM to go
Things are improving here, we had another rough night, big waves and a lot of rolling. I wanted to get the main up, but worried that going up on deck in the night with such big waves tossing the boat around wasn’t worth it, and also that the waves would cause the main to slam around too much. The forecasts all seemed to point to a lessening of the wind and waves over the next 48 hours as the Low moves away from us and weakens. By morning the wind was down to 10-15 knots, not much at all, but the waves were still a few metres high and the boat was rolling badly, I decided to get the main up, with one reef in it, this turned out to be a simple enough job in the end. First I have to get the boat pointing into the wind and waves, this needs the engine on, but the headsail has to be put away first, which can be a pain in bigger winds, but as I only had a partial staysail out, this went in easy. On the coachroof, it was quite rolly, but I have a guard rail around the bottom of the mast, which makes it very secure there. Up went the main with a single reef, back to the cockpit, engine off, main out, and genoa unfurled to about 50% and we were off again. This time on a faster reach with a nice heel to starboard. Back in the cabin you could feel how much better the motion was, we went from 3 knots speed to around 5-6, and the rolling was much reduced. Looking at the weather forecast, the great circle route takes up back into the low we are trying to get away from. So I’m going to keep going east for a day or two until the High pressure system ahead of us kicks in, I think this is the pacific high, and we will turn north when we reach that and follow it around until we are north of Seattle then probably make a direct course for Juan de Fuca straits. There are more lows heading across, and I expect the typhoon about to hit Korea will head our way at some point as a much weakened depression, but all in all, I’m hoping for a calmer ride for a while.
Casualties/Damage A few bruises from being thrown around the cabin, a few coffee stained items of clothing/fabrics. The batteries are only just providing enough power to run the auto helm and the heating system. The eberspacher draws quite a lot of 12v power, despite being a diesel heater! The solar power is reduced a lot under these very grey skies. Still we haven’t had to run the engine for a charge since the panels were installed earlier this year. We are discharging the batteries by about 50-55% overnight right now, which is more than I like, but still fairly acceptable under the circumstances given that they do generally get a full recharge each day.
I have replaced the missing bolts on the solar panels and they are back in place and I have realised that the problem with the bow thruster will most likely be at the control unit in the cockpit. When the wooden box/tray fell off, it exposed the wiring behind the binacle/pedastel to the spray, the Garmin navigator is playing up now as one of the sockets, in the same area was exposed on its back. Both of these are not an issue, we don’t use them on passage and as I say to Kathy, once we get becalmed, I will do all the delicate jobs while she gets on with cooking the soufflé and baking my multi tiered birthday cake, with intricate England footballers holding a small iced world cup aloft! Kathy cooked up two wonderful pot noodles yesterday, and as an experiment, she used one of them as floor polish, I think that’s why she was spreading it around the galley floor, then wiping it up again 😉 I have attached a picture of Kathy in our sea berth seeming to be coping quite well
Yesterdays daily run was a miserable 85 miles, but hopefully we can start improving on that now.
Paul Collister
Day 12, 2nd July. 39-19N, 166-08E. Daily Run: 95 NM. Weather: 15-20 Knots wind, rain, cold. 3000ish NM to go
Day 12, 2nd July. 39-19N, 166-08E. Daily Run: 95 NM. Weather: 15-20 Knots wind, rain, cold. 3000ish NM to go
Conditions deteriorated throughout yesterday, The wind strengthened up to 25-30 Knots, the sea built to good 4 metres with waves coming from several directions. The boat was being thrown around a lot, but worst of all the main big waves were on the beam, coming from the NW. This caused the boat to roll a lot, so much that it got quite worrying and I changed course to head East so the big waves were on our port quarter. This reduced the rolling but added in the corkscrewing affect you get when the stern is lifted up and dumped back down somewhere else. We couldn’t cook dinner, and a sandwich had to suffice, Kathy couldn’t get her wine into a glass so had to swig from the bottle. This morning things aren’t much better, the waves have dropped a bit and we have got more used to things, but sleeping through it all seems to be the best approach right now.
Damage Report: Well not a good night really, a spare halyard undid itself and went flying, I couldn’t reach it, and as it had a stopper knot in the end, I hauled it up the mast where it will remain as a spare shroud, until it’s calmer and I can climb the mast to retrieve it. It’s used to get the dinghy on and off, so no big deal. More worrying was the solar panels, two of the three bolts on the port side of the port panel got fed up with the waves and departed. I just caught the panels as they tried to follow, and they are now held in place by a few lengths of rope. Not a big deal now, they are still working fine, in fact pumping 30A into the battery as I type, thankfully the sun is popping out once in a while. A more worrying matter was the screaming noise that came from the V berth earlier today, it woke me up, and I rushed up to the cockpit to see what was going on, I assumed a torn sail or some calamity at the bow, but all looked fine, jumping into the v berth it was clear the noise was internal, so the only thing I could think of was the bow thruster, I pushed the cut out switch to OFF, where it should have been anyway, and the noise stopped. I have no idea what is going on, but again it can wait until it calms.
Later this morning I did a full tour of the deck, re-secured a diesel can, tidied up the dumped mainsail, checked everything I could see and noticed a fair bit of bird shit on the coach roof. At least someones getting the benefit of us being out here. We saw our first albatross yesterday, I wasn’t sure until it spread it’s wings, which were massive.
It’s too rough to spend any time in the cockpit, the cap rails are constantly being dipped underwater and waves splash over all the time, so we haven’t done a lot of whale watching yet!
Again the forecasts for the next few hours tell me what I knew already, but further ahead than that, I only have a rough idea.
Paul Collister
Day 11, 1st July. 39-16N, 163-45E. Daily Run: 127 NM. Weather: 25 Knots wind, rain, fog, cold. 3096 NM to go
Day 11, 1st July. 39-16N, 163-45E. Daily Run: 127 NM. Weather: 25 Knots wind, rain, fog, cold. 3096 NM to go
Yesterday the wind was on the beam and I put up the mainsail with 1 reef and 50% genoa. This worked well and the boat sped along, well balanced until the evening, by midnight the wind started gusting very strong and the sea had built to 3 metre waves. The boat was tending to round up, that is turning into the wind on the bigger gusts, the auto helm was then giving up. Around 1AM I went out into a rather rough sea and dropped the main completely, The genoa was reduced to about 25% and the boat chugged along nicely at about 5-6 knots. The wind has continued to strengthen and the seas are now about 4 metres with some cracking big waves running us over every now and then. So all in all, not a very comfortable day today.
My improvement to the sliding kitchen drawers yesterday resulted in one of the drawers ejecting itself across the galley today, the catch had stopped working, so I have a bit more sympathy for the original bodge now. The draw will need a small amount of glue applying at some point 🙁
Today a big cargo ship passed by within a mile, pic attached, the first in a few days.
The low pressure system we were heading across was meant to go north and weaken, instead it has moved slightly east and in our way, it’s also squeezing up against the Pacific high making for a very windy route east if we go that way. Again the forecasts are not much use, A low or high only needs to change its course by 10deg or deepen / weaken faster or slower than expected, and the wind we experience can vary massively.
The connection to the sat phone became unplugged last night and the battery went flat on it, I expect if you are following our dots on the map, you might have seen us stop reporting. This got me to thinking that if the sat phone breaks a lot of people might worry for us, but it’s more likely the satphone will break before we get into trouble, and should we get into trouble we would activate one of the two EPIRBS we have on board, so I wouldn’t worry too much if we disappear from the map.
Currently we have passed the 25% point, but our keenness to escape the typhoon zone around Japan, meant we did great speeds then, so I would think in reality it going to be another 4 weeks sailing, arriving probably during the last week in July.
Paul Collister
