Day 10 - Under 1000 Miles

The night went as I had expected. The wind dropped to below 10 kt and I went to bed with only a bit of jib sheeted hard and the autopilot doing the steering. I woke up at first light to find that sure enough the autopilot had disengaged. Fortunately the heavily sheeted jib had kept the boat pointing downwind without flogging or fretting, and we had made about 2 kts toward our destination.

The light wind presented a good opportunity for another useful engine run to charge the batteries. I ran the engine at 1500 rpm and we were doing 5.2 kts toward TdC under autopilot control. I would not go back to sleep because I did not trust the autopilot and not surprisingly an hour later I saw on the chart plotter the boat starting to make its characteristic counter clockwise circle when motoring with free steering. The autopilot has always behaved like this since I purchased the boat. Sometimes it will go for days without a problem then there will be a run of 2 or 3 disengagements every few hours. The worst part is that no alarm is raised, although once in a while an error message will be displayed at the head and a feeble beep will sound, audible only at the steering station. The chart plotter always knows the state of the autopilot yet I have found no way for having it issue an alarm when it detects a disengagement. I will discuss this with a technician in Australia, or Cape Town if I have the misfortune of arriving there with electronic problems.

After the 3 hour engine run the wind was up to 15 kts. I rolled out the headsail to the starboard side, shut down the engine, set Jeff the Monitor steering, and soon we were dong over 5.5 kts more or less toward the island. It was a bright and sunny day and I was hoping for comfortable, pleasant, and productive sailing.

Last night I received a message from Jeanne Socrates, who is bound for the Horn on a route similar to mine last year aboard her boat "Nereida". That represented the first time that I had been in communication with a fellow long distance sailor while at sea, and it was good to hear from her. She gave me valuable advice about arrival at Cape Town and also wrote "NO WXFAX FROM BRAZIL - wasting your time and batteries trying!!" I gave Jeanne a big Thank You because she was the first person to confirm that there is a problem with the Brazil wfax service (like, it probably doesn't exist). I replied to her that I will see about having Brazil de-listed from the "Worldwide Marine Radiofacsimile Broadcast Schedules" that is prominent on the internet. That bogus listing wastes seamen's valuable resources and can lead to bad passage planning. ... It means of course that the entire western side of the South Atlantic has no wfax coverage. (To find Jeanne's web page Google "Nereida".)

I encountered a bit of trouble with the BU-353 GPS antenna connections to the laptop. Marine Plotter kept reporting error from its GPS. I did a swap and then it was OpenCPN that had the problem. I replaced the suspect GPS antenna with a brand new one and still had a problem. I swapped the GPS cables to different USB slots on the hub (there is a choice of 4) but that didn't help. Finally I moved the USB hub from the ordinary 2.0 USB port to the much faster 3.0 USB port and everything came good. This could be the solution to a long standing intermittent problem with these GPS antennas, and if so would represent another benefit for from new laptop.

Speaking of laptops, I took a hint from Stephen and found that I can get the Acer netbook to come good by hitting the "shift" key hard while the cursor is in that berserk mode. The cursor immediately stops and the machine begins to function normally. This is no fix but I am relieved to know that in a pinch I can still call on the Acer as a backup. I'll see if Stephen has anything more to say on the matter.

At 11 AM the apparent wind was approaching 20 kts and the boat speed was surging to 7 kts. I rolled in a lot of headsail, but I put needless stress on the sail and risked a repeat of the flaying sheet breaking my spray dodger window by waiting too long to shorten the sail. By noon the apparent wind was hitting 22 kts making the true wind more like 26 kts. The boat was moving very comfortable to the E at 5.5 kts but the following seas were building up. The sky was bright and sunny, but thre was a slight chill in the air. I had used the blanket for sleeping and was now wearing long garments during the day. There were yet more sea birds. At the first light of dawn I could see perhaps a dozen prowling the are for breakfast.

At noon our position was 32S31, 032W17, giving us a n-n distance of 82 miles in the direction 113T. I was satisfied with that modest n-n distance, given that we had been dealing with aftermath of the gale. We were 1025 miles from Tristan da Cunha and I was looking forward to passing the 1000 mile milestone before the day was out. The barometer had dropped 1 point to 1009 hPa.

At 4 PM I went out and rolled in some more headsail. The boat had been doing fine, though surging to over 6.5 kts during gusts. I wanted to get ready for the night, when the wind speed was predicted to rise to the high 20's and also to back 20 degrees, probably forcing me to gybe the boat in order to maintain a reasonable heading. The sail area was now suitable for the higher winds and would pass through the gap between the headstay and the second forestay during the gybe without my having to reel in more sail. Thus the sail was ready for the night. We were still making over 5 kts with the reduced sail and the boat was traveling beautifully. We were getting big boosts from those huge following waves.

I trimmed my moustache but will not shave the beard until Cape Town. It's too impractical to shave regularly in a small boat.

At 4.45 PM we passed another milestone and were 1000 miles from the island. I was confident that I would be able to spend Christmas on Tristan da Cunha, anchorage permitting. I celebrated the milestone with what else but a cold beer.

After the beer I managed to free the two pocket zippers on the Gore-Tex raincoat.

At 6.30 PM I gybed the boat and gained 20 degrees on the mark. An hour later we went through a patch of light rain but the weather soon cleared again. At 10 PM we were still on the same tack doing 5 kts in front of a 22 kt wind.

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