Day 18 - Hard Slog, Equipment Problems

I has now been 48 hours of hard sailing with little reward. It is hard because there is a lot of activity putting out sail, trimming the sails, fiddling with the automatic steering, bringing down the sails, lashing things down for another bout of rolling seas, etc. Most deck work must be done wearing nothing but a harness in order keep my clothes dry. (The weather is warm so it is quite refreshing, actually.) The miserly reward is told by the miserable noon-to-noon distances.

At about 5 PM yesterday I saw that we were going to cop a lot of rain from a system approaching from the north. I shortened the headsail and got my things ready. It was a good solid shower and I had generous hair shampoo and shower then set about collecting 10 liters of water for my empty container. After that the wind died and I had dinner with Pachuca lying ahull becalmed and surrounded by shower and drizzle. While watching the movie I noted that there was a marginal wind outside and when the movie was over at 10.30 PM the wind had strengthened that extra knot or two to make sailing feasible. Soon we were beating WSW into a 9 kt southerly under the full headsail and single reefed mainsail. WSW was far, far from an ideal direction, but this boat can't point very well into a weak wind, I suppose due to laws of physics. At least the boat was sailing comfortably and we were getting some southing out of it.

At 2.30 AM I woke up to flogging sails. The air was still and the sea was as calm as I've seen it since departing from Mexico. I dropped all sails and at 3 AM began motoring south at 2200 rpm, 4.5 kt. We were at latitude 07N37 and had made only 9 miles to the south since the previous noon. It was time to start a program of serious motoring. I prepared buttered toast to cheer myself up.

At 7.30 PM I detected a bit of wind from just west of south. I shut down the engine (121.3 hrs) and sailed with the jib toward the SE at 3 kt. What bothered me was that the weather looked just as cloudy and drizzly to the south as to the north, suggesting that I was still in the clutches of the ITCZ.

At noon we were still sailing SE against a 10 kt southerly. Our position was 07N09, 113W55. Our n-n distance was a discouraging 41 miles, much of which had come from motoring.

Minutes after issuing the noon position report we ran into one of those big gentle squalls and lay ahull for an hour in drizzle and visibility of 3 or 4 miles. While I was contemplating starting the engine the wind picked and it was Tally Ho again on a SE course into a 15 kt wind. The big question in these circumstances was whether it was a "real" wind or the ephemeral effect of a nearby squall.

Hours after having shut down the engine I was still getting benefit from its latent heat. Quite a bit of moisture had found its way to the back of the cabin from rain coming through the companionway and my scrambling in and out during the deck work. I noticed that the moisture on the companionway landing, which is actually the top of the engine cover, dried very quickly. I turned out the heater fan, which sucked warm air out of the engine compartment, and soon the area around the galley and navigation station were dry too.

At about 2 PM the Raymarine system failed. The chart plotter reported that it lost position. I heard a clattering in the closet behind the nav station and it was the autopilot black box making a clacking sound that I had never heard. Repowering everything did not fix the problem. There were no loose wires and the entire area was bone dry. At the steering station the autopilot reported Seatalk failure. Seatalk is the simple protocol by which all of the Raymarine instruments talk to each other. No Seatalk meant that the chart plotter could not get GPS information, nor information from the wind instrument. It could display nothing but a map of the world.

I suspect that the problem lies with the autopilot black box. Tomorrow, when things quiet down (the sea is confused and rough), I'll see if I can take the autopilot off the Seatalk chain and at least get the chart plotter working. At this point I don't hold much hope for the autopilot.

In the meantime I am relying on Dave's "GPS Data Logger" chart plotting system for navigating the boat. For wind information I have to look at the instrument above the companionway.

I then decided to hoist sail to take advantage of a strong SSE wind. I tried using the engine to keep the boat pointed into the wind so that I could hoist the mainsail but that proved too difficult without the autopilot. Every time that I left the wheel to raise more sail the boat would go off the wind. Eventually I did it by using the headsail get me underway more or less into the wind so that I could raise the mainsail. While rolling out the jib the sheet seemed to hit a snag. I looked forward and saw that it was caught at the base of the shroud. Before I could do anything about it the sheet freed itself and in the violent wind the sheet hit the right side of the spray dodger like a crow bar and shattered the plastic windshield.

I expected problems like this but not so soon.

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