Day: 15 July 2018

Day 25, Sun 15th July. 49-15N, 157-49W. Daily Run: 137 NM. Weather: 10-20 Knots W, Cold to go
A bit of a blow in the night, but mostly lightish winds, 8-12 knots from astern. I spent a fair bit of the last 24 hours keeping the mainsail happy, with gybing back and forth as the wind wobbled around. Looking at the charts, it’s hopefully straightforward now, we just follow the high pressure system around to the mainland. At the moment, it looks like the ‘high’ is staying quite far north, so we need to go further north to benefit from it and not get stalled near it’s centre. This means we approach Seattle from the North and as such I think we willl make landfall in Canada. Right now I’m looking at Bull Harbour as our first stop, an Indian Reserve that is well sheltered and has a dock and moorings available.
The main event for me was doing a gybe this morning, I hadn’t payed enough attention to the genoa, which wasn’t furled properly from some point in the night. It’s impossible to see the genoa from the cockpit when the main is up, and impossible at night as it’s so dark, but the end result was that as I went to let the genoa out some after the gybe, it wrapped around itself tying a knot in itself around the foresatay. Much as a spinnaker does all the time. This is a terrible situation, as it means the sail is sort of out, and flapping a lot, but not doing any good. eventually you have to take a knife to the sail if you can’t unwrap it. Pulling on the furling line or the sheets tends to make the situation worse, the best way I believe to fix this is to reverse the sequence of events that caused it, so you need to take the sail back through the wind, and hope for a gust to undo the knot. All the time the wind is flapping the sail and tightening the knot. Annoyingly for me, I had to undo the preventer and dutchman I had just set up after the gybe to get the main back safely to midships, get the autohelm running, start the engine and take the boat through a series of turns into the wind to try and coax the sail out. I was about to give up, as everything I was trying seemed not to work, when suddenly the sail started to unravel, then with a whack, it was out and full of wind. So then back to the planed course, sails trimmed, auto helm on, preventer back on, dutchman re-tensioned and away we go. The whole procedure took nearly an hour, however it only felt like 15 minutes to me.
I’m back on the electric autohelm now as the chain I repaired on the Monitor self steering vane packed in last night, We went wildly off course and almost gybed, however the main auto helm was able to take over, despite using loads of power. So thats a job for today, I have a cunning plan, that involves making a chain link out of fishing line.
While on deck this morning I found the other half of the shackle I found yesterday. So that’s nice, when whatever it was holding together flies apart I will have a shackle to put back in it.
Kathy is now 5 games in the lead on scrabble, but I intend to put a stop to her runaway success today!
The boat has been rolling badly for a few days now, so Kathy has postponed the bread making. I’m counting the chocolate bars alongside the days left, I’m not panicking yet, I presume they have chocolate in Canada.
Paul Collister.