Day 27 - Still Running Downwind

I connected to Africa at 7.30 PM and got a scorching transfer rate of 5700 bytes/min and I thought that I had it made. The grib file that I had ordered the night before but was forced to cancel because of the slow transfer rate was not delivered so I connected again and ordered another one. Thirty minutes later I simply could not connect in order to download the file. I slept for 2 hours and was up at midnight to try Africa again with no success then I connected to Chile, which turned out to be a frustrating experience. There were 2 grib files waiting for me, and 1 short message. It took about 20 minutes to download the older grib file and short message and another 15 minutes attempting to download the final file. In the end when the transfer rate was averaging 158 bytes/min and there were too many retries the system gave up and disconnected me. So I wasted 15 minutes of air time for a file that I will have to download tomorrow whether I want it or not(Grib files get stale.) Very frustrating. I'll have to place my hope in the Africa service and I'll have to figure out the best times and frequencies.

As I was finishing the session there was an abrupt wind change with rain and I spent a busy 20 minutes on deck gybing the boat and setting up the Monitor. When I got back in the cabin I had to change my track suit bottom and underpants because they were damp. Both sets of wet Musto weather trousers are failing and I will get a replacement in Cape Town. I am not complaining because they gave great service from the time we departed from Fremantle in 2008 until I arrived in Argentina earlier this year. In the meantime I'll see about using an outfit that I purchased at the general store in Neah Bay which the Alaska fishermen use.

Thirty minutes later I had to go out in the rain to adjust the Monitor airvane. I thought of putting on the damp and cold clothing then the leaky wet weather pants on top of that and said to heck with it. I stripped from the waist down and went out wearing just the sailing jacket over my T-shirt and sweater. It saved a lot of time and bother, and I was ok as long as my chest remained dry and warm.

The wind had died down and we were creeping at less than 3.5 kts. There would be no record breaking n-n distances tomorrow.

The wind kept weakening and the boat speed dropped below 3 kts. The adverse combination of weak wind, rough sea, and low speed through the water was threatening to overwhelm the Monitor so I stayed up to watch the boat with my fingers crossed. Eventually the wind began to pick up (Phew!) and I turned in at 2.30 AM with the boat making 4 kts. I was tired and did not set an alarm. I woke up at 8.30 AM to find the boat still sailing to the east under a clearing sky, although our SOG was below 4 kts even after I rolled out more sail.

I had little success with SAMMNet at the 11.30 AM session. At 14.316 MHz USB, the Indian and Atlantic Ocean session, I could just make out a human voice. At 7.230 MHz LSB, the coastal net session, I heard nothing. The failure with the coastal net frequency is not surprising because of my distance from the coast. The failure with the higher frequency may be due to atmospherics of the angle of incidence of the signal to the upper layers of the atmosphere, which would put me in a sort of cone of silence. My best bet was to close in on the African continent as fast as possible.

At noon our position was 36S01, 004W47, yielding a respectable n-n distance of 118 miles in the direction 087T, almost directly to CT. I figure that at least 72 of those 118 miles were gained during the first 12 hours of the sailing day, before the midnight wind change. We were now 372 miles from Tristan da Cunha and 1150 miles from Cape Town. The barometer was steady at 1015 HPa. The sun was out and the boat was moving well to the east at 5.5 kts.

While preparing the noon report I spotted my first ship since TdC. She was the Concordia a cargo vessel doing 12 kts directly east, suggesting that she would round the Cape to reach "Bandar Imam Khomeni", which must be in Iran. She would pass within 3 miles to my port so I would get a good look at her.

It wasn't even noon yet and wind charger and solar panels were delivering enough charge to give me a 5 amp surplus over what was being discharged to run the computer and the chart plotter. The house bank was reading 12.9V, though I knew that it would settle to 12.6V during net discharge of the night. That wasn't bad considering that I had last run the engine on Day 23, 4 days earlier.

We were sailing too far to the south so I decided to gybe, which would alter my course to cross that of the cargo ship but would not pose a danger because of the ship's greater speed, and it's just as well I did. Eventually I saw the symbol of the ship flashing on the chart plotter to indicate that it was a dangerous target (i.e. we would pass within 2 miles of each other). But there was no sound. During my last close encounter with a ship I had suppressed the alarm because it kept going on and off as our closest point weaved in and out of the critical 2 mile circle, and I had forgotten to turn it back on. That meant, of course, that had I been asleep I would not have been aware of a critical target approaching. That was very careless on my part and very dangerous, particularly in the busy waters that we were about to enter. From now on the alarm will stay on all of the time and I'll just put up with the temporary sounds.

I put in two final hours of sewing to finish the repair to the spray dodger, as I was down to the final CD of Rock 'n Roll, 1954. After a late lunch and a refreshing 1 hour nap I woke up at 4 PM to find the boat moving well at 5.5-6.5 kts to a brisk wind of perhaps 15 kts. This would be the third day of sailing downwind under headsail since passing TdC and it had been a very productive run so far. I would wait until things were a little quieter before attempting to fit the spray dodger.

Following Jeanne Socrate's advice I prepared a message to the manager of the Royal Cape Yacht Club asking for accommodation for my boat during my planned 6 week stay.

After several false starts I am now getting wind speed readings again. It seems to be those high winds that causes it to fail.

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