Day 76 - Steady Progress

I woke up at 1.30 AM during another squall flurry and suited up to roll in some more headsail. The sky was still partly cloudy but not overcast and to my amazement I saw dawn breaking on the horizon. Since we have light until 11 PM I would say that we are getting less than 3 hours of total darkness at night. I reduced the headsail to less than the area of the trysail and we were still doing 4.5 knots.

Mark in Port Townsend had alerted me to the presence of a comet that can be viewed over southern Chile just before dawn. I looked to port to the NE over Chile and there it was. It looked larger than the largest planet but was more fuzzy and reddish in color. I wasn't completely sure that it was the comet until I returned to the cockpit with my long distance glasses and had a careful look. I could see the glow of its tail. It looked pretty spectacular in the wild setting of the ocean and weather, and I could well understand early peoples freaking out at these events and inventing explanations of their meaning.

Throughout the morning the wind continued to be fair off the stbd quarter and we made good progress in the direction of the Horn. The day was similar to the previous one, with large sections of blue sky and bright sun as well as scattered clouds and the occasional squall. The cabin temperature at noon was 53F and outside it was probably in the mid 40's. Given my position on the ocean I could not complain.

At noon we were at position 53S23, 086W17, giving us a n-n distance of 104 miles. Better yet, the wind had allowed me to steer the boat 113T, directly for my turning point for the Horn. We were 720 miles from the Horn and were now south of Punta Arenas, Argentina, in the Strait of Magellan. During the next 24 hours I expected the wind to swing W, then NW, the N where it would reach 30 knots. Then it would swing back down to the SW and weaken. This meant that it would be unlikely that I would be able to maintain the boat speed or steady direction of the last 24 hours.

I put in several hours sewing the headsail and at 3.30 PM I went topside for a break. Absorbing the entire scene I realized that it really wasn't a bad day for sailing. The sun was out, the wind was fair, the huge swell was off the quarter pushing the boat along, and the unseen current was giving its assistance. The wind was down to 12 or 13 knots and the boat was effortlessly making 4 knots right down the rhumb line.

I did as much as I'm going to in stitching the UV cover of the headsail. The UV cover is a piece of UV resistent material about 18" wide that is sewn on two edges of the sail so that when the sail is rolled up only that material is exposed to the sun. A section of several feet had become unstitched and I thought that I'd tidy it up while I had the sail down. A simple line of stitching was just too difficult to do so I sewed spots along the material about 6" apart. It is not a structural problem so I didn't think that a heroic repair effort was warranted. I stopped work there and will put the sail repair tape on tomorrow when I'm fresher.

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