Day: 22 July 2018

Day 33, Sun 22nd July. 52-12N, 140-34W. Daily Run: 117 NM. Weather: 5-10 Knots SE, Sunny and cold, 479 NM to go
A lovely 24 hours of sailing, after reading up I did a bit of sail trim, and managed to squeeze an extra 1/2 knot out of the boat, but better still, the sails look like textbook examples right now with the slot between the main and genoa running parallel / even, those who sail will know what I mean.
So we are just north of the centre of the high, and have quite light winds, generally between 5 and 10 knots apparent, yet we are maintaining about 5-6 knots of speed most of the time. It just shows how a flat sea makes such a difference. We are not quite close hauled, and I don’t want to go closer to the wind as it will slow us a bit and not really get us there any quicker, as it will just get us into calmer winds sooner. Instead the wind vane is keeping us about 60deg to the wind, and from our track you can see how the wind shifts keep sending us north of the direct route to Vancouver Island. I’m banking on the wind veering a lot as we pass east of the top of the high, and with strengthening winds we should reach then broad reach at some speed towards our destination.
I plan to head for Port Hardy on Vancouver island, the only problem is that the channel to it has strong currents, given that we will be near spring tides when we get there, they could be formidable, 3-4 knots against us, I don’t want to sail at night, so timing will be everything, and may delay our arrival by a day so we can get the tides with us in daylight. We always have bull harbour where we can wait at the entrance to the channel if needed.
I was explaining to Kathy yesterday that sometimes there are big solar flares that can wipe out HF Radio propagation, and that might have happened, explaining why we couldn’t receive anything, I quipped that it could also be the fact that the antenna wire might have snapped off, so just to reassure myself I checked the wire, which had indeed snapped off. What had me doubting this in the first case was that the antenna was tuning with a SWR of 1:1 which would indicate it was fine, however this just shows how good the ATU is at tuning a few feet of feeder wire. Apologies to those who don’t know what an SWR is, but it’s not that interesting really.
I managed to cook our favourite Sunday breakfast of poached eggs on toast this morning, and with some lovely new french coffee it’s been a good start to the day, the sun seems to shine more each day as well, ensuring an ample supply of power. We haven’t needed the engine, so we are using the fuel keeping the cabin warm. The eberspacher truck heater works a treat.
I had made a brief recovery on the scrabble front, curbing Kathy’s breakaway freak streak of 7 games in a row, with my own run of 3 wins, however that came to an end yesterday. I need to find more words made entirely of vowels.
Currently we are hoping for an ETA of Thursday, possibly Friday depending on the tides.
Paul Collister