Day 7, 27th Jun 2018, Pos 36 – 13N, 152 – 45E Daily Run 163 nm. Weather, Breezy and Sunny.
Yesterday the wind dropped down to zilch, so on went the engine for 14 hours until the early hours of today when the wind started to pick up. With the engine running at 1500RPM, it doesn’t use much fuel, less than 2 litres an hour, but with the 3 knot current we make about 6-7 knots SOG. We have about 1 days supply of fuel we can play with if the wind drops again, the rest I’m keeping for emergencies and for docking.
We are sailing across the top of a high pressure system, and although this makes for lovely weather and calm seas, it does little for the sails. Today we are further south than this time yesterday, this feels wrong, but it suits the weather patterns we expect, there is a strong low coming our way but passing further north. Mostly we are here for the Kuroshio current, the West Pacific version of the Gulf Stream. I downloaded the latest position of it yesterday over the SSB Wefax and was surprised to see it was really close to us, it had moved from a week ago when I last checked, and it meanders south a bit before turning North. So I decided, given the light winds, that we would motor along the path of the current. The Japanese charts shows it stops abruptly around 160E but in reality I think it swings north to north east and joins up with the Aleutian current. I’m hoping this coincides with our change of course. Part of the reason for going east and not following the shortest route to Seattle from Japan is the typhoon season. Typhoons also want to go to Seattle and seem to take the shortest route up the coast of Japan following the great Circle route before curving away East into the Pacific and weakening, getting whacked full on, offshore by a typhoon is going to make my diet coke far to fizzy for me, so we are heading east, in order to put ourselves as far away as possible from the typhoon path. As it stands now, we are in a good position, given that it will take a few days from the creation and announcement of a typhoon, to it reaching us, and given that within a few days we will be beyond the normal reach of the typhoons, we are relatively safe.
Statistically we have gone from around a 2-3% chance of meeting one, to much less than 1% I would guess. So going east with this current helps get us into a safer place, but also lifts our speed massively. Yesterday we managed 163 nm which is good for no wind and the engine running quite slow.
Damage Report: Not a lot to report, however the plan to leave the spinnaker pole hoisted backfired, I went up to move it out of the way this morning and as I was man handling it, the up-haul attachment snapped, the pole, and it’s a heavy thing, came flying down, went over the side, but didn’t get far as there are so many attachments to it. It was quite a shock, it happened so quickly and could easily have had someones eye out 😉 Anyway, the wire strops from each end of the boom meet around a stainless steel ring in the middle to where an uphaul rope is attached. The wires had chafed through, one completely, the other close behind. For some reason I had thought that wire on steel would be quite chafe proof, but not so. The wire should really have been in steel eyes. I have rigged up a solution that should work, but for now we are sailing close hauled so it’s not needed. I have attached 2 pictures showing the problem. All in all I think the pole setup is a disaster, I wanted to change it all in Asia, but it’s impossible to get the fittings there unless you have them shipped in. It’s all going over the side at the next port we reach! We have a lot of birds following us and circling us, I said they looked like seagulls but a bit grey, Kathy thinks the might be more exotic and that they may have been offended by my common reference. They circle the boat constantly and are growing in number. I wonder if Hitchcock did this passage? Today I will have a go at fixing the water maker, however as the wind/waves/speed increase on this close hauled tack, delicate working gets less likely. Kathy, in between her proper watches, as apposed to my alarm clock based system, continues to provide excellent food and today we may finish our last (freshen in the oven) baguette. My Philippine bought Edam cheese, although a bit hard is very tasty.
I assume everyone realises we have no web access so I can’t see or respond to any replies to the blog, but don’t let that put you off, we look forward to reading them when we reach our destination.
Paul Collister
