Day 80 - Steady Downwind Progress

At the 2 AM weather fax session I could see that dawn was breaking. At Longitude 078 I was too far east to keep using the La Paz time zone much longer. Anyway, the sun was too far to the right and a visit to the compass confirmed that we were headed NE. This was good. While the fax was being download I gybed the boat which put us on good track of about 120T. The wind was down to a pleasant and manageable 18 knots and the sea was calmer. I hoped it would all last for a while.

I woke up at 8 AM to find that the wind had veered slightly and strengthened to 25 knots. The sun was shining and there were heavy rain clouds to the west, all suggesting that another cold front had passed over the boat. I looked at the sails and they were handling it fine. Our course was to the SSE and our boat speed was within my acceptable limits of 4-5.5 knots. Jeff had steered the boat all night flawlessly.

Running downwind with the trysail and a bit of jib is probably unorthodox and has the big disadvantage of allowing us to run no closer than 30 degrees off the wind. However, I like the advantages first of having the trysail up and ready all of the time because of the frequency of high winds in this area, often with little warning. Second, it is flexible. The trysail works in winds of 10 to 40 knots and more, and I have such little jib working that it would probably handle a 28 knot wind. And third, of course, is that it puts much less load on the headsail. When I was frantically working on the control lines while trying to steer in rough weather I must have accidentally gybed the boat a dozen times, but when we crossed the wind the jib would go over first, and very gently because it was being blanketed by the trysail. It was the trysail that made the loud snap when it went over, which was painful enough to my ears, but at least I knew that it had been built to take it.

At 10.30 I suited up and visited the mast for the first time in 2 days. Everything appeared to be in order. The Zodiac was till firmly tied to the platform, the fuel containers were all in place and looked secure, the mainsail was still firmly tied to the boom. Best of all, that once-repaired backup headsail that had so magnificently brought me this far looked comfortable as it did its work in the 23 knot wind. From the good perspective of the shroud it appeared to have the same area as the trysail, about 42 sq ft. Back in the cockpit I tightened one of Jeff's control lines slightly and I saw another hint of oil glistening on the floor. The bubble in the compass did not look noticeably bigger, but I was convinced that it was leaking its oil during huge rolls in heavy weather.

Just before noon I gybed the boat for the second time in the morning. I was trying to play the wind shifts to get as good a lay on our destination as possible.

At noon our position was 55S23, 077W46, giving us a n-n distance of 86 miles in the direction 103T. We were 375 miles from the Horn which was on bearing 096T. My actual target was Isla Diego Ramirez, 330 miles away on bearing 104T.

At 6 PM I detected the wind shift that I had waiting for, from the west. This improved our heading by 20 degrees and I was looking forward to good progress overnight. The sea was very rough and we were frequently hit by squalls but thanks to the conservative sail plan we got through them OK and Jeff always managed to recover the course.

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