At 8.30 AM I did a visual deck check and everything seemed to be in order. Jeff was in good shape too with his control lines still tight. I found a beautiful specimen of a flying fish in the cockpit but unfortunately it was too late to save him. Our position was 05N32, 114W19, so we had made 56 minutes of southing since noon, with 3.5 hours to go to the next noon.
The Rutland wind charger had come into its own in that wind. It was putting out anything from 2 to 4 amps at any instant. Over a period of 24 hours this is significant. I entered the night with the house bank at 12.5 v and welcomed the morning with 12.6 V. (I don't run the refrigerator at night.) The contribution of the wind charger made up for the loss of solar power due to the cloudy weather. I hadn't run the engine for 2 days and was wondering if I could get away with a 3rd day.
The sky cleared from the east and by noon we were in bright sunshine with maybe 10% cloud cover. The wind charger was still delivering its 2 amps or so (The output jumps around from 0 to 5 amps), and the solar panels were delivering 7 amps, which would increase as the sun passed over to the starboard side of the boat where the boat was heeling. This was the first serious sun that I had seen in 3 or 4 days.
At noon our position was 05N24, 114W27, for a n-n distance of 70 miles. We had moved 1 degree and 5 minutes to the south and were on a latitude between Medellin and Bogota Columbia, about 2350 miles to the east. The wind was still from the SSE at 20-22 kts. I had gotten my wish for a steady wind but it had been a boisterous beat to windward.
After lunch I went to the port deck to attend to the fuel containers on what was now the weather side. I tightened a few ropes and added the two at the ends as I have described earlier. As long as I make regular checks of the ropes I think that the deck cargo will be OK - at least until we get to the high latitudes. At the mast I coiled some line that had come loose and while there had a look around for any surprises. All looked well.
The boat had been riding quieter and I noticed that the wind had dropped to around 15 kt. While I was on deck I saw the boat stall momentarily when it hit a particularly large wave at the wrong time. The boat needed more drive to show the waves who was boss, so I rolled out the headsail from a no. 1 to a no. 2 and immediately gained a half knot in speed. Our course was still good: directly SW.
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1 comment:
Oh! guess no chance of eating that flying fish...must have been there too long....poor chap!
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