On The Move

As the grib file had predicted the wind died down at about sunset yesterday. To the credit of Jeff the boat continued to sail downwind all night quite often below a speed of 1.5 kt. Thankfully the 20 nm or so that we made during the night were in the general direction of SF. The batteries needed topping up so we ran the engine for 2.5 hours, making 5.5 kt on 1200 rpm. During this time the boat became enveloped in fog but that lifted an hour or two later and the sun emerged in a bright blue sky. We then resumed sailing at about 2.3 kt and agreed to implement our plan of putting up the spinnaker after lunch.

I had been tempted to try the MPS spinnaker, with its advantages of easy deployment and dowsing with a ring and no need for a spinnaker pole. However, even though Pachuca's MPS had been checked out as OK I had never seen it up and I had never been on a boat that used this type of spinnaker, so I decided to play it safe and use the standard spinnaker that I knew. Also, that MPS seems gigantic and extremely heavy, and I wasn't sure if it would be suitable in these light airs of about 6 kt.

After lunch I took my time and spent over an hour meticulously setting up the spinnaker lines and the pole. I discovered that I had previously been using the wrong halyard for the spinnaker, so that was progress. While I was setting things up we were sailing with about no. 4 jib with Jeff doing the steering. During the preparations I removed the staysail and sheets off the deck. Just before the hoist I rolled in half of the jib and turned the boat more downwind. With the pole in place and Brenda handling the sheet I hoisted slowly and steadily while Brenda pulled on the sheet. Soon the kite was up with a wine glass but with a bit of pulling and poking the spinnaker sorted itself out and we found ourselves doing over 4.5 kt with an apparent wind of about 6 kt. We tried using Jeff to steer the boat under spinnaker but that did not work out, as I had feared. There must be issues with the low apparent wind and light helm affecting the performance of the wind vane steering. We let the autopilot handle this one. Before long Brenda and I were at the steering station, her having a lemonade, me having a Heineken, looking at the blue flat sea, blue sky, Pachuca managing herself under spinnaker, and thinking that this is what cruising is supposed to be about.

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com