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.
