Day 14, March 20

I woke up at 2 AM to find the boat creeping along at 1.5 kts to the SE with essentially no wind - perhaps 4 kts. We had moved far enough to the south - 43S20 - anyway, so I dropped sail with little drama. Lying ahull our motion settled down to 0.4 kts to the SE, which was fine with me. This would not be a day of a big n-n distance but we would make up for it with the coming two days of strong winds.

Last night I came up with the bright idea of defining a waypoint marked by a small blue "x" at every noon position so far in this passage. I named each waypoint "ddmmmyy", as in "19Mar13". The effect is terrific, showing on the chart at a glance the procession of x's along my track with the dates underneath them. But it gets better. A listing of all waypoints also presents the distance from our present position to each waypoint so that I can see at a glance how far we've moved from the last noon position (currently 46.37 nm) as well as from our departure point, RCYC (994.08 nm). I even set up a waypoint at the entrance of the Fremantle Sailing Club named "Home", and I can now see at any time the distance remaining in the passage (3854.40 nm). With a click I can sort out the waypoint list by name or distance. Sorting by distance groups the waypoints of this passage together at the top of the list, nicely ordered. I will use this information to report daily the distance-made-good (DMG) from the RCYC and distance-to-go (DTG) to FSC. DMG and DTG will be a better measure of my progress because n-n distance is very rarely directly toward the destination.

At Fremantle I will export all of the waypoints and will be able to send them via email to anyone running the OpenCPN navigation software who wants to display my daily position on this passage. Importing the waypoints into OpenCPN will be a trivial operation.

At 3 AM a beautiful red dawn (sailor's warning) broke and not long after that a gentle wind came up from the NW. I rolled out some jib and got us under way on the wrong tack, then by repeatedly building up speed then turning into the wind I raised the mainsail to its new 3rd reef. It was a good learning exercise and I'll be better prepared next time. At the moment I cannot get the 3rd reefing ring on the luff of the sail low enough to reach the goose neck because of the number of slides stacked up on the gate. Fortunately I had the 3rd reef downhaul in place and it is that that is holding the tack down. The next time I have the sail up to its first reef I'll open the gate and drop any free slides at the bottom of the sail. At the moment the 3rd reef line is about 1 ft above the boom, which Steve said was OK, but I'd prefer to get it right. Also, the 3rd reef needs one more cringle near the leech. I'll attend to that in Fremantle.

This made me think of the spare mainsail that is stored in the loft of my garage. It was in very good condition although Steve Hartley at Tasker Sails could not guarantee that it would get me around the world. That sail came with the boat when it did not have a stack pack, and I'm fairly sure that it has 3 sets of reefing points.

Anyway, at 4.15 AM all was in order and we were moving ESE at 4.5 kts on a broad port reach off of a 10 kt wind. The staysail was still on the deck ready for use later. The air was crisp and the sky mostly clear and sunny.

At the second SAMMNet session Graham told me to expect a bout of 30 kt winds. I could hear him speaking with Jeanne and with great managed to get her position of 43S11, 102E19, which puts her only 800 miles SW of Cape Leeuwin. Her signal is fading for now (it picks up at 120E for some reason) but on the other hand she's very close to Australia. Graham told me that he thought that I've got a stronger signal that Jeanne so the prospects are good that he will be able to oversee me to Fremantle's back yard.

After the session I sat at the companionway for a while assessing the preparedness of the boat for the coming blow. I vacillated a bit but then decided to put up the staysail. The reason why I hesitated is that I was concerned about how to bring down the sail if I had to heave to. Then I realized that because of the tall and narrow shape of the sail and its heavy material it can take a lot of flogging. If I have to heave to I'll take the boat into the wind and let fly the staysail sheet. Because it is hanked on a wire it will most likely bring itself down when I release the halyard, but if not I can attend to it when the boat is hove to. As before I hoisted the staysail inside of the headsail, and even though the headsail completely overlapped the staysail it still retained its shape. As the wind speed increase I'll roll in more headsail until ultimately I'll be running with the triple reefed mainsail and the staysail.

I then went to the nav station at noon and dropped a waypoint marker at our current position, naming it "20Mar13" and describing it as "Day 14". I then brought up the list of waypoints and recorded the following numbers:
- NND (Noon to Noon Distance), 92 miles to the east
- DMG (Distance from start), 1038 miles
- DTG (Distance To Go), 3803 miles

I was extremely pleased with the NND given the extremely weak wind that we had experienced during the night. However, for most of the day we had been making between 6 and 7 kts on a beam reach off of a 15 kt wind in a moderate sea. That and the sunny sky made it a great day of sailing. While I was at the foredeck freeing up the staysail for the hoist I stood up, looked around, saw myself in context, and thought "I'm really enjoying this." I was having fun and I would remember this moment. Having said that, I won't let myself get too cocky and will remain humble and wary because you never know what is around the corner. But I don't think that there is much around the corner shipping wise. I haven't seen a ship or boat since Day 3 of this passage, when I cleared the Agulhas bank. I have just consulted the "Ocean Passages' chart of routes for powered vessels and between Cape Town an Australia the great circle shipping route touches 40S just south of St Paul Island. At 100E ships bound for the east coast of Australia or New Zealand dip down to about 42S. So in these waters I can expect perhaps a large fishing boat or maybe a research vessel. The only yachts that I know of in these latitudes are Nereida and Pachuca, although it is likely that there area few more.

At 2.45 PM the wind started to top 20 kts and the boat speed was approaching 7.5 kts. What alerted me was the regular clattering of the strop holding down the tack of the staysail. Looking through the front hatch I could see that the sail was luffing at its peak so I winched its sheet in. I then rolled the jib in entirely which slowed us down to 6.5 kts. Then I noticed that we were now heading slightly north of east on a pure beam reach so I took the opportunity to fall off the wind such that it was now 15 degrees or so aft of the beam. This reduced the apparent wind speed and dropped our boat speed to 6 kts, but the boat was sailing more comfortably and the staysail was happy and quiet. This was all in anticipation of the wind peaking at 30 kts within 3 hours.

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