Day 22, Wednesday 11th July. 47-10N, 171-01W. Daily Run: 104 NM. Weather: 8 Knots WSW, Cold/Rain/Fog. 1901 NM to go

Day 22, Wednesday 11th July. 47-10N, 171-01W. Daily Run: 104 NM. Weather: 8 Knots WSW, Cold/Rain/Fog. 1901 NM to go
Yesterday continued the theme from Monday, rain, fog, light winds and generally miserable, like a typical summers day in Manchester 😉 A dismal run of just 104 NM, with speeds often around 3 knots. The wind picked up for a while, and we had a few good hours of progress, also the sun came out just long enough to get some much needed charge into the batteries. The charts from NOAA (The National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration, or something like that) showed a gale approaching with 35 knot winds, It looked on their charts like it was going to run us over, but so far there has been no sign of wind, I changed course a little to the south in the hope of missing it, but in the end have just ended up closer to the high pressure. If you are wondering why our course is wandering all over the show, it’s for 2 reasons, firstly at night we tend to let the wind vane steering follow the wind, rather than try to adjust the sails and course, unless its a major wind shift. Secondly, often the wind is coming from close to astern of us, and we will steer to keep it on one side for a few hours, then change it to the other side by gybing later. To gybe is a big deal when the headsail is held out by the spinnaker pole, as it often is in winds from astern. The sail has to go in first, then the pole has to come down, then go up again on the other side, then the sails can be moved across. Invariably after this has been done, the wind shifts meaning we need to go back to the old course. In the bigger picture, going off course won’t make that much of a difference to when we arrive, we still expect it to be during the last week in July.
Other news is light on the ground here, Kathy won her third game of scrabble in a row, she’s hoping to set a new record for 4 in a row, most unlikely. You don’t see them playing scrabble on the Volvo ocean race now, do you!
The main news is that I was checking the boat yesterday before sunset and I noticed a mark on the mainsail, closer inspection revealed damage to the sail. It had been chafing on the lower rear shrouds when fully out. This is bad news as the sail is pretty new and I had every intention of preventing this, but failed to put chafe protection on either the sail or shrouds. Originally I had planned to swap the mainsail for the old one, but that has a few problems, one being that the battens don’t fit anymore as they had to be trimmed for the new mainsail. Also it’s not really possible to get to the shrouds to put some anti-chafe material on them now, even if I had enough. So I dropped the sail to check further, and it’s mainly the batten pockets, which protrude slightly that have taken the wear, with the one I looked at having worn a hole the size of a penny in it. This could easily tear more in a strong blow, so I will have to repair it before the sail goes back up, but I also need to inspect the other 15 places (4 battens, 2 shrouds, 2 sides) where it might be chafing on the batten pockets. It might be better to get the old mainsail out and put that up. I’m not sure how that will look without battens, it might be fine as it’s mainly for downhill runs, but in a blow it might be useful if we can go to wind. Lots of things to think about before I do anything. Hopefully after I see todays forecasts I will be able to decide and get the job done before dusk. For now we are making about 4 knots towards the east in 7 knots of wind from behind. The only problem is when the waves kick us and we fall back the sail collapses, then comes back with a huge whack that shakes the boat. I have reduced the headsail area to a level where the shock seems reasonable. This does take its toll on the sail as well as the rigging, but hopefully not too much.
The waves are subsiding now, but for the last few days they have been coming from very different directions, we sometimes get waves arriving from the bow, beam and stern at near the same time.
The little NMEA/SignalK router I use to send data from the sensors (Wind,GPS and AIS) to the iDevices and MacBook keeps rebooting, sometimes every 30 seconds, I can’t see any reason why it should just have decided to do this now, but that’s a job for today to try and find the cause.
Finally I had a go at repairing the clocks, I figured it couldn’t be much, but the first one I looked at is now in the bin, valuable knowledge learnt about cheap clock mechanism’s and how not to take them apart. I paid nearly £1 for this tasteful plastic timepiece in a shop in Langkawi. Next, I was disappointed that the brass nautical ‘Quartz Crystal – Fanchet of Paris’ chronometer, which probably cost £50 or more, also had a very similar cheap plastic mechanism inside, just fancy gold looking hands. However with my new qualification as Master Watchmaker, I was able to find the bad connection, a little bit of copper that just needed a little bend, and away it ticked. So we now can see the time again without having to reach for a mobile phone.
Do tune in tomorrow to see if Kathy managed to get 4 wins in a row on Scrabble, hopefully by then we will have found out if England are in the world cup final or not.
Paul Collister