SF-SD Day 3

It looks like we are on the move at latest. The good wind that we had at noon did not last long and we soon found ourselves dawdling at 2 knots again. We ran the engine for 90 minutes to replenish our batteries and get some distance. Because the light wind was from the beam the sails remained filled as we motored. The wind finally dropped to below 4 kt and we were forced to drop all sail and we were expecting to lay ahull all night. The boat was drifting roughly east at about 0.5 kt.

I put together a pressure cooker meal of pork, lentils, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, a can of tomatoes, and broccoli. The rice I cooked separately, served with Paul Newman sauce. It turned out to be a pretty good meal. The pork that Brenda and I had purchased weeks ago was superb. It was the first time that I had used the pressure cooker since I had replaced a part which had been shipped from Australia, and it worked fine.

But just before serving dinner we got some wind. In the fading light of the day we hoisted the mainsail with one reef with the hope of pointing into the 6 kt southerly breeze and increase the apparent wind speed. An hour later the wind died down again and I was at the mast tightening the lazy jacks before dropping the mainsail when we got wind again. From then on things got better and better, at a small price. Just before climbing into my bunk at 8 PM for some sleep Arnold said that the wind had backed and we were heading east. I helped him tack the boat. Then the wind veered and the boat started to head west, so it was out of bed for another tack. Then the wind backed and the boat was again headed east so out of bed again for another tack. But wait, there's more! The wind veered one more time and we tacked a forth time and the wind held steady with a course toward the Channel islands.

After a final hour in the bunk Arnold woke me up just before midnight for a weather fax session. By 1 AM I had the current surface chart, a 500 mb chart, and the 48 and 96 hour surface and wind/wave prediction charts. There is a string of storms headed east along roughly latitude 40N. Two of the storms will be packing winds of over 50 knots. I am no expert on the 500 mb chart, but the one I received seemed to confirm that the jet stream has dropped to the south. In 40 hours the Bay area will get 35 and 40 knot winds and it will be worse (as usual) along the Oregon coast. Seas will be at 9 meters (29 ft). Mercifully, even in our then present position 110 miles NW of Pt Conception we would escape the worst of it, but at the rate we were traveling we expected to be well south of Pt Conception in 40 hours.

We sailed into the next day on the same tack with boat speeds between 5 kt and 3.5 kt. I had a scare shortly before dawn when the wind weakened and backed sending us WNW. Fortunately I decided to hold the tack until daylight and 20 minutes later the wind veered and set us on more or less the original course. I had a second such episode later in my watch and Arnold had the same experience after taking over the watch.

At 11 AM I got up and cooked a brunch of sausages, bacon, and eggs that tasted pretty good to us.

At noon we 75 miles NW of Pt Conception, 55 miles off the coast, and confident that we had escaped the impending bad weather.

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