Day 46 - Water Situation OK

Shortly before going to sleep I realized that I was paying too much of a penalty in speed by running downwind with both the staysail and the partially rolled out headsail. I dropped the staysail and rolled out the headsail to a no. 2 and we gained a knot of speed. I didn't like putting all of the load on the headsail, and it pained me to see it jerk whenever a severe boat roll took its wind out, but it was simply too useful in these downwind conditions. At the beginning of the 2 AM fax session the wind situation looked good because it had strengthened to 13 kts. However, during the next hour it dropped to the point where the headsail was starting to thrash. I went back to the dual configuration where each headsail took some of the load and the headsail would not flog as hard because of its reduced area. Nevertheless I had trouble getting to sleep, listening to the racket every time the boat went into one of the rolling spasms and the sails flogged, though I must admit that most of the sound was from the blocks jerking around above my head rather than from the sails themselves.

Then a new element arose, our heading which had backed to about 110T. I figured that my gybe angle was about 80 degrees which would put me at about 190T. This would actually take me farther away from the Horn but the name of the game was still to reach the westerlies, and 190T would move me south much faster than 110T. Besides, I didn't want to move any more to the east until we got below the centre of the South America high. So just before 5 AM, under the light of the near full moon, I checked that the sheets were clear at the foredeck (e.g. not wrapped around a bollard), loaded the winches, then gybed the boat. When it had settled down we were on a course of 190T, as I had calculated. While steering manually during the maneuver and I had difficulty with holding the boat on her new course in preparation for engaging Jeff because I kept over steering and yawing 20 degrees on each side of the heading. When Jeff took over those wild oscillations stopped and the heading was confined to a narrow band. The reason, of course, is that Jeff reacts quickly to nuances in the wind direction.

At 9 AM I was up to find that the wind had strengthened somewhat and we were doing 3.5-4 knots on course 190T, with very little flogging of sails. I was happy with my earlier decisions to go back to the twin headsails and to gybe. The mornings were getting cooler. The cabin temperature was 72.7F. The sun was out through a sheen of thin cloud cover.

All of the drizzle since the ITCZ had provided only 10 liters of water that I had used for washing, and I was very close to getting down to my last store of drinking water, a sealed 20 liter container of pure reverse osmosis water from La Paz. I decided to keep it in reserve and begin using water from my internal tanks. I thought it an appropriate time to audit the tanks so I got my plumb sticks ready and open the bung of each one. I did not need the measuring sticks because both tanks were so full that I had to prevent water from pouring out with the roll of the boat. So I was at a known point with my fresh water tanks: 140 liters in each one. At the rate at which I had been using water they should last about 70 days, though in an emergency I knew that I could stretch that 70 days by reducing my consumption from 4 liters a day to 1 without detriment to my health. This was all worst-case stuff because I was confident of an eventual downpour that would allow me to fill all water storage and have me dancing in the rain covered in goose pimples.

Our noon position was 32S55, 120W18, giving us a n-n distance of 65 miles. We had moved a shade more than 1 degree to the south. Given the circumstances I could not complain. I had expected difficulty in that gap between the trade winds and the westerlies. Noon found us moving on course 190T and 3.5 knots.

As the afternoon progressed the conditions became more gray then drizzly. The afternoon weather fax showed that the low that I had seen the day before had arced down to the SE and now there was a front passing over my area. This explained the abrupt wind changes predicted by the grib files for the next 18 hours. There is always a small at the top edge of the sealed companionway and a few drops of rain were making it almost to the nav station. It took me about 3 minutes to set up the shower curtain that protects the nav station and I found it very easy to live with. So it was an unpleasant afternoon of dismal weather and incessant rolling of the boat. However, the boat had continued south and 3.5 knots with little stress to the sails. I occupied my time with a double whammy of bread baking and yogurt making.

I hadn't been on the deck all day so at 6.45 PM before settling down for dinner and a movie I harnessed up and visited the foredeck. The headsail was doing fine. I told it Well Done and that I was doing everything I could to protect it then blew it a kiss. All else seemed to be in order. I surveyed the horizon and it was a nice scene. There was a certain wildness to it with the moderately high wind and strong following sea, and whitecaps as far as the eye could see, all crystal clear under a setting sun shining brightly through breaks in the clouds. I would have said that the front had passed, particularly since we had just sailed nicely through a squall that took the wind to over 25 knots, except that the wind had not yet veered to the west. Back at the cockpit I checked Jeff's steering lines and they were still taut. Somehow this unorthodox downwind configuration of staysail and headsail at less than the area of the staysail were powering us along at 5 knots in front of the 20 knot wind.

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