Good Start

It looks like our gamble paid off and we are off to a good start for California.

We motored for the rest of the day yesterday without any help from the wind and averaging about 4.2 kt. However, the sun came out in the afternoon and the seas continued to get calmer. Brenda felt queasy and wisely spent most of the day in the bunk.

For dinner I heated up two of the beef meals still in the hold from the Pacific crossing. Brenda could eat only a little bit of mashed potato and gravy so I wound up having double rations.

This was coastal sailing, not the solitary Pacific crossing, so I kept pretty busy in the night monitoring the chart plotter and looking out for lights. I turned the radar on for several hours to become more familiar with it. I found that the radar image was consistently off in one direction so I used the software to rotate the bearing alignment -8 degrees to get a good match between the radar images and those on the chart plotter. I then spent an interesting hour dodging two ships. An overtaking tanker bound for Portland altered course as I thought that he might to cross my path 3.5 nm ahead. Then I spotted a towing tug on essentially a collision course (200 ft) 45 minutes away. I waited as long as I could then swung 20 degrees to starboard toward the tanker and cleared both ships by over 2 miles.

It was actually a very pleasant evening: calm seas, half moon, stars out. A group of 5 or 6 dolphins played around Pachuca's bow for about 20 minutes before they got bored and moved on.

I pumped 44 strokes during the first 11 hours of motoring, indicating that water intake while running the engine is down to about 4 Whale Gusher strokes per hour, which is a lot better than the 20+ strokes per hour before the muffler was replaced. Zee of Shoreline Diesel had reported quite a bit of water streaming from the stern gland. I then shot a few more squirts of grease into it and tightened it until I could feel resistance from the packing, but that may have been enough.

At 9 PM I noticed a steady wind off the port bow. I rolled out a 1.5 jib and soon the speed was up to 5.7 kt. Shortly after midnight Brenda got up and felt well enough to give me a break. I took one last look for lights and hit the sack at 1 AM while Brenda conned the boat at the navigation station. I woke up at 1.45 AM and Brenda said that the wind was up and maybe we could shut down the engine. We shut down the engine and found ourselves doing over 5.5 kt off of a 15 kt Se wind with just a 1.5 jib. We had run the engine for about 16 hours.

At about daybreak the wind picked to over 20 kt. After a breakfast of toast and coffee ventured on the deck for a general check and to plan the sail change. We had been sailing with a bit of jib only and I was hoping to put up a better balanced sail plan. I raised the staysail and rolled in the headsail and the boat speed dropped from over 4 kt to under 3 kt.

I then made a valiant attempt to raise the trysail but had to give up because it is too difficult and dangerous to do in a rough seaway. The first problem is trying to zip up the sail cover. This is difficult enough in an anchorage, requiring climbing part way up the mast to finish the zipping operation. I realized that it was too dangerous to complete that job so decided to tie down the front of the mainsail. But then there is the problem of the lazy jacks which must be completely dropped. Then there is the task of feeding the trysail slides up its track. There are two problems with this. The first is that to gain access to the track the entire front of the sail cover must be peeled away from the mast. Then the feed operation itself is difficult because the slides can be passed around the bend of the track only with great difficulty. Then when the slides reach the join between the curved track and the straight one they still give trouble, even though I did a lot of work on the join with a Dremmel tool in Honolulu. The last time I raised the trysail I had to climb part way up the mast to help some of the slides along. Unless I figure a better way to do things hoisting the trysail on Pachuca will be a calm weather thing in anticipation of a major blow.

So I decided to raise the mainsail with a double reef. I also decided to do it alone while sailing and without the help of the engine to bring the boat into the wind. I finally figured out how to do it. (The key is to let the leeward lazy jack right off to fly as far from the sail triangle as possible.) and when I finally got the sail up I realized that the second reef line had not been completely set up. I had to drop the mainsail and sort that out. It was a hard, wet, sweaty time - my hardest sailing since before Hawaii. But after four months where the only "sailing" was the four weeks of magic time in the San Juan and Gulf islands, I got a quick re introduction to working my way around a pitching wet foredeck.

Late last night in the pitch black after the moon had disappeared the autopilot decided to go on standby without warning after more than 16 hours of faultless operation. I managed to set up Jeff the Monitor wind vane steering in the dark and I marvel how tolerant and reliable he is. It steered the boat with just a No. 4 sized jib, staysail only, and now staysail with double reefed mainsail, all without any problem. It even managed to steer the boat when it speed dropped below 2 kt during the sail change.

So at noon Pachuca was on a heading of 240 T doing 5.5 kt off the 20-25 kt wind with her double reefed main and staysail. We were approximately 110 nm SSW of Cape Flattery. We expect a wind shift from SE to E then SW before the onset of the W wind early tomorrow. Brenda was still debilitated with sea sickness and I am going what I can to support her. She is very good in that she never ever complains about it and stoically soldiers on until she gets though it - just like Lord Nelson used to do.

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