At 1035 GMT I began a prearranged radio schedule going through four different frequencies and failed to hear anything from Jim who was transmitting from the Fremantle Sailing Club facility. It was particularly disappointing because Jim had invited Brenda and Stephen to join him. I did notice that reception from Radio Australia at 9.580 MHz was less clear than usual.
At 9.30 AM I freed the wheel and started sailing. The trysail and headsail were already up and I rolled out a bit of headsail. In the feeble 7 kt WNW wind the best we could do was slightly aft of a beam reach putting us on course 210T at the speed of one knot. It was just a start, according to the grib file. The day was overcast with visibility to the horizon. There was weak sunlight getting through the thin cloud cover.
I took to opportunity to run the engine 1.3 hours while the wind was weak. I found that Jeff was able to steer the boat so I went below and spent an hour doing a little job that might save me grief later. The sliding hatch jams up when it is extended all of the way and twice when I had it in that position to keep the rain out I've had such a difficult time opening the hatch that I considered going out the cabin hatch so that I could push it in from outside. I treated it with WD40 which freed the action for all but the end of the travel of the hatch. During rains I've been forced to leave a 1 inch gap to allow me to the my fingers around the end of the hatch for a backward pull, but of course that has allowed some moisture to get into the cabin. Today I fixed a stainless steel fitting at the end of the hatch to which I can attach a line enabling me to pull back hard with one hand while banging it with the other. The system works well enough.
While doing this work I noticed that the sails had stopped fretting and when I shut the engine down I confirmed that the wind had strengthened to maybe 9 knots. I eased the heading a few more degrees which put us on a heading of 180T at speed 2.1 knots. (The "T" denoting a true heading is important because the compass variation in this part of the ocean is a whopping 20 degrees to the east and increasing fast as we move south. Thus 180T corresponds to 160M.)
At noon our position was 41S15, 115W09, giving us a dismal n-n distance of 19 miles.
Before the wind picked up I had a go at sewing the webbing of that slide on the mainsail, but I found that even when I put the boat on a beam reach there was too much rolling. I decided to do the job in either calmer conditions on a beam reach or perhaps in the cabin if I took the mainsail down. There are good reasons for removing the mainsail for heavy weather. Less windage is the obvious one, but another is that it would allow me to drop the storm trysail two feet down to just above the boom, and the lower the trysail the better because it reduces the turning moment on the mast. I used the thread picker from Brenda's sewing kit to free the webbing, which was hanging on literally by a thread. I wanted to reuse it because the spare webbing in the sewing kit was a little too wide for the slide.
I then prepared the mainsail for stronger winds by using a long line to better secure the mainsail with 11 loops of rope along the length of the boom.
The wind had picked up to perhaps 12 knots and we were on a heading of 190T. I figured that with the stronger wind I could gybe on an arc of 80 degrees or less. I was willing to go as far as due east because it was time that started to work my way eastward, but I was not willing to head north of east. Happily, the gybe found us on a broad port reach on course 125T, and we were making 3.0 knots. I only had a small of headsail out and I kept it so in case I needed to gybe later and besides, with the expected 18 kt wind I figured that the modest sail plan would give me all of the boat speed that I wanted.
I had lunch hopeful that the impending winds of that low to the south would give us good progress for the next two days. And speaking of food, I had eaten the last of the eggs the previous night, that of Day 55. Of those last 4 eggs one was bad. I had set out from La Paz with 4 dozen eggs and of those 48 eggs, 3 were accidentally cracked and 3 went bad. They spent the first 3 weeks or so in the ice box where they could get some of the coolness from the adjacent refrigerator, and during that time I rolled them over every day or two. When space became available I moved them into the refrigerator and ceased the practice of rolling the eggs over. Under those circumstances I would consider 50 days to be the outer limit for store bought eggs. I still had plenty of cheese and enough turkey sandwich meat for another two weeks or so.
For my nap I switched over to the starboard bunk, which was now to leeward. I was now sleeping with two blankets, one below, one above. Before lying down I poured some La Paz water from my reserve bottle into the kettle and boiled it. After my nap the water had cooled just enough for making the next batches of yogurt and mung bean sprouts. We had just crossed the meridian of 115W and were now on the east side of it for the first time since 16 Nov, when we had been 16 degrees north of the equator.
At 7 PM I went topside for a look around. We were in fog with visibility down to a mile, but I didn't care because we were still moving to the ESE at 3.8 knots and for once I was happy with the wind.
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1 comment:
Glad the wind was helping Pachuca. Good luck!
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