Day 40 - Difficult Winds

The 2.30 AM weather fax indicated that I would soon be passing through a cold front that would take the wind from N to W to eventually SW. However, I would miss the centre of the 995 hPa low which lay to the SSE.

After the ABC news at 3 AM I returned to bed and made a valiant effort to sleep but I was too concerned about the coming wind change, and rightly so. I rose at 4 AM to find the boat headed ESE, which meant that the wind had backed to the west as predicted. I put the boat into the wind then rolled up most of the headsail. Then it was time to put up the staysail. I didn't need to go to the foredeck because I had not lashed the sail down to the deck but had simply laid it along the rail netting in a twist. It was very dark because the moon was down and the sky was cloudy, so I decided to try to hoist the sail blind hoping that it would all work out. And what an easy sail it was to hoist! It reminded me of my early days of sailing in small boats. I pulled up the sail by hand then gave the halyard a half a turn on the winch then did similar with the sheet, and that was that. I set Jeff to steer us into the wind and we wound up doing 2 kts to the south against a 9 kt wind. I would not be able to raise the mainsail until dawn but that would give me time to let the cold front pass over and to see what would happen with the wind. If it stayed strong and clocked back to the SW then we'd simply sail to the SE until dawn. If the wind dropped off too much for sailing the sails were small enough for me to simply allow the boat to heave itself to. This was all just as well because I had a radio session with Jim at dawn and I wouldn't have time to tend to the boat.

I was surprised to see the house battery voltage down to 12.1V. I knew that I would need a lot of power for the radio session so I ran the engine for about 40 minutes and unfortunately had to hand steer during the session. I found out later that I had inadvertently left the refrigeration on all night (grrr!). I am looking forward to the day when I can turn the refrigerator off permanently. From what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that this boat is very close to self sustaining in electrical power when the fridge is not running. It was all of no avail because Jim and I were not able to establish radio contact. I'm sure that he was as disappointed as I was, but if we did it once we can do it again and we'll keep working on it.

At about 7 AM the wind died and I dropped all sail. We were drifting under a grey sky surrounded by drizzly clouds. The grib file did not promise relief for 24 hours. There was nothing else to do but relax and wait. It was difficult to relax through the bouts of heavy rolling that made every loose thing in the boat slide and clink and clatter and bang.

At noon we were dead in the water at position 26S45, 122W50, giving us a n-n distance of 81 miles. We had moved 1.3 degrees to the south.

After lunch I noticed a weak SE wind. According to the grib file the wind would eventually settle down to SE so I thought that sailing was worth a shot. At first the 6-7 kt wind could barely sustain the staysail. I left it up, flapping a bit, and somehow Jeff manage to keep steering with only 1.2 kt boat speed. Thirty minutes later the wind looked stronger so I rolled out some headsail. Thirty minutes after that the wind was 9-10 kts so I took a chance and hoisted the mainsail to the first reef. That held OK and soon we were steering SSE at 3.5 kts off a port tack. I wasn't sure how long the wind would last but with sailing you've got to use wind when it is there, no matter how much trouble it may be to get the sails up. I felt more cheerful: not only were we moving again, the infernal rolling had stopped. Unfortunately it all died down an hour later. I spent 30 minutes hanging on to the main sheet dampening the impacts of the swinging boom in the hopes that the wind would pick up but after 30 minutes I gave up and dropped all sails. 5 and 6 knot winds are not quite enough to support the sails in the rolling sea.

The wind came up again an hour before sunset. I ran with headsails for a while to see if it would last. I took opportunity while there was still light to raise the mainsail again. That left us doing about 4 knots SSW off of a 10 knot wind. There were more rain clouds ahead at the horizon so I wasn't sure what the night would bring. Never mind. I was getting better at raising the mainsail. It was no longer the drama that it was before.

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