Day 22 - Spare Headsail Up

NOTE: I've been having much trouble in obtaining a Sailmail connection for getting out this blog and receiving messages. This is no doubt because I have strayed so far from land. I have in fact tacked back toward the east in the hopes of getting service from either Panama or Chile. Because my communication is totally dependent on short wave radio propagation there may be days between my blogs and it should not be a cause for worry.
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This wind has proven to be reliable and for a second night we sailed SW at 3.5-4.5 kts. However, the wind had veered 15 degrees in the last 12 hours and we were making WSW at 235T ahd headed for the Marquises. I rarely sail hard into the wind. I have found that I get better speed and less lee pointing a little bit off the wind. For me that means a tacking spread of 120 degrees. Given that, I figured that I could tack without losing any southing, and taking me a bit more east, which I wanted to do.

I tried to tack but the boat did not have enough drive to cross the wind. I didn't want to wear ship (tack by turning the boat around the other way) because of all the canvas I had up with my single reef, so I started the engine, which I needed to run anyway. Using the engine I crossed the wind to a starboard tack then set the sails and put the engine into neutral to see how we were sailing. We were doing about 0.9 kt. I trimmed the sails a bit and managed to get just over 1 kt, but this was nowhere near acceptable. I went below and brought out the Ocean Passages chart of the world's ocean currents and sure enough I was in the middle of the South Equatorial Current, which is strongly set to the west. I wasn't prepared to fight the current so I tacked back to the SSW heading. Indications were that once I crossed the equator I could expect backing winds and a more southerly heading.

That experience made me realize that the boat wasn't driving as hard as I had thought and that I'd better get cracking with putting up the spare headsail.

There was less swell than on the previous day and the wind was down to 11-12 kt apparent, as had been predicted by the grib file. It was as good a time as any to bring the headsail down. First some preparatory work: Remove clothes and paper products from the forecastle lest water come through the front hatch. Unlock the forward hatch but leave it closed for now. Gather the wire cutters, small adjustable wrench, and cord the put on shorts so that I can carry the tools and cord in the pockets. Carefully take out every twist in the headsail halyard and flake it so that when the sail was dropped there will not be a kink in the rope to force me back to the cockpit. Give the roller furler line a similar treatment. I decided to keep the staysail up to make sure that Jeff could hold our course. The sail would fall outside of the staysail and it would be up to me to crawl between the staysail and the rail and haul in the sail as it dropped.

I then rolled out half of the sail and too photographs of the tears in that magnificent sail. Then I rolled out the rest out and let it flog in the wind. Then I eased the halyard and got a sense of how fast the sail would drop. Fortunately it would not be too fast, otherwise it would have dropped into the water before I could haul it in. So I let the halyard fly, went to the foredeck, then got on my knees and started hauling in sail from the tack end. By then part of the sail had dropped into the water and it was a race between my hauling in sail up and over the rail and enough sail dropping into the water to enable it to fill, which could have led to nasty consequences. After what seemed like 30 minutes but was probably 15 minutes of hard yakka enough of the sail was on board to enable me to tie it to the rail and free free it from the peak and tack shackles. I tied down the halyard so that it would not go flying up the forestay then crawled back and removed the sheets. I had thought that I would have to drag that heavy sail forward and around the inner forestay then back into the hatch but saw that I could pass it under the staysail, which would save a lot of work. Another 15 minutes of effort and the sail was down the hatch.

During the deck work I noticed that the wire strop to the tack of the staysail was wrapped around a nearby cleat. This explained the crease and slack area at the bottom of the sail that I had noticed the day before but obviously did not investigate enough. When I sorted that out the sail had the proper shape. I hoped that between that improvement and the removal of the drag caused by the loosely furled damaged headsail I might get a bit more boat speed.

This left part III, putting up the spare headsail. This should be the easiest part except for one possible problem. Putting up the headsail is easy when there is someone in the cockpit pulling up the halyard while the other is at the forestay feeding the bolt rope of the sail into the extrusion track. But how was this going to work out for someone on his own? I decided to have lunch and a nap then deal with it later.

At 2 PM I arose and told myself that there were no excuses for delaying the attempt to put up the spare headsail. The sea was comparatively calm and the wind was at about 11 or 12 knots. I put on my shorts, gathered my tools and stainless steel mousing wire and got to work. I lifted the sail onto the deck too it out of the bag, then orientated it with the tack forward. I connected the tack then traced to luff to find the peak then connected that. Then I worked my way along the foot to find the clew and connected the sheets. The result was one big ball of sail on the crowded deck with connections that I hoped were correct. Then the worrisome part. I got the sail started in the headstay extrusion track then it was a matter of aligning as much of the bolt rope under the track as possible then going to the mast, pulling on the halyard to lift a bit more sail, cleating it off, then going back to the bow to align more sail. I got help that I had not expected. I had forgotten that the extrusion rotates so that we didn't have a case of the sail binding on the track because it is being pulled to the side by the wind. Nevertheless it got messy, with much of the sail skimming along the water, but I managed to get it up. This is where the sail's reentry into the world got fairly traumatic because the unsheeted full sail was going wild and I could do nothing about it until I took the halyard off the cleat at the mast and brought it on at the cockpit using the winch. The popping and banging were phenomenal and I have no doubt that anyone who had gotten in the way would have had bones broken. Eventually I sheeted it in and could see the tape where the sail had been repaired in Adelaide in 2008, and the repairs were minor compared to what would be required for my first line sail. Then I rolled in about 2/3 of the headsail and off we went doing over 6.5 kt very comfortably toward the Marquises. Later I revisited the foredeck to secure the forward hatch and took pleasure in seeing the boat sailing like a cutter with two foresails and the mainsail.

After it was over I would have paid $50 for a cold can of Pacifico Clara beer. I had to settle for my favorite drink on board. I slice a lime in two, squeeze the halves with a pair of piers into a glass, throw both halves into the glass, then fill it up with water. I get 2 or 3 refreshing drinks out of it.

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