Day 15, March 21

I woke up at 2 AM after 5 hours of deep sleep. It took me a moment to remember that I was on the boat and frowned at myself for copping out on the boat, but I supposed that dreams and escape are a part of sleep.

As usual the first thing I did was to look at the chart plotter and everything looked good. We were still moving at over 6.5 kts and our course had swung 20 degrees to port as I had expected, and we were now tracking at about 080T. I brought up the waypoints list and saw that we were 91 miles from the noon marker, and we had another 10 hours to go before the next noon marker. At the laptop I saw that we had reached our first milestone of sorts and had passed across the north of Prince Edward Island 190 miles to the south. Then I heard water slopping in the bilge and gave the electric pump a 3 minute run. The cabin was relatively dry. The cabin windows do not leak any more and the leaky vent over the galley stove is no more, thanks to work done in Cape Town. Very little if any water had washed over the cabin and no waves had crashed onto the companionway from abaft, so there were no drips from the cabin hatch and vents or into the companionway section of the cabin. It had been a great night of sailing so far.

At 5 PM I had not known what to expect. The wind had built up and was approaching 25 kts and I was wondering if it would hit the predicted 30 kts or worse. I wasn't worried about the wind so much as resultant huge seas. For the next 2 hours I sat at the nav station watching a movie ("Michael Clayton") and the chart plotter as much as the movie. At 6 PM, the predicted peak time, the wind was at 25 kts and I was hopeful that I would be lucky this night. The boat was riding amazingly well and outside I didn't see any of those huge seas that threaten to board the cockpit but never quite make it. Once in a while I would hear a wave break onto the side of the boat. At 7 PM I started and second movie ("The Island") and when it finished all was still well with the boat so I went to bed.

At 3 AM I saw daylight through the hatch so I stuck my head out and had a look. The Monitor control lines were a bit loose and I was glad that I had tightened them up just before dark, but it had steered the boat beautifully throughout the night and was still happily doing its thing. The sails looked good too. The combination of triple reefed mainsail and staysail had been ideal for these conditions, frequently taking the boat to 7.5 kts but never giving me the feeling that the boat or Monitor were being overwhelmed. I could see that waves were regularly washing over the bow and side decks but not reaching the cabin top. All was well, so I returned to the cabin, switched off the masthead tricolor, and finished my mug of tea.

I was awaken at 5.30 AM by a wave slamming against the port side of the boat. Even though the boat was heeled to starboard a few drops of sea water made their way along the ceiling onto the navigation table, which is on the port side of the cabin. I had gotten complacent and left the laptop open and unprotected but fortunately there was no damage. I had already adopted the policy of completely removing the computer from the nav station and stowing it safely in its bag during rough weather when the boat is on a starboard tack (heeled to port), and now I added the policy of always protecting the computer by folding it lid down an putting the shower curtain material over it whenever the are in rough weather and the boat is heeled to starboard. Soon afterward another wave slammed onto us.

The wind seemed to have slackened off to the high teens and our boat speed had dropped below 6 kts so I rolled out some headsail, which took our speed back up to over 6 kts.

Graham expressed surprise at my progress when I gave him my position at the 6.30 session. We had moved 117 miles in 18.5 hours and were heading toward a good NND (noon-to-noon distance).

At 8 AM our boat speed was down to 5.5 kts so I dropped the staysail and rolled out as much jib as we could carry running on a broad reach. This brought our speed up a half know.

The rest of the morning brought gentle sailing under a clearing sky with surprising boat speeds of 6-7 kts.

At noon our numbers were as follows:

NND 152 miles
DMG 1171 miles
DTG 3646 miles

That noon-noon distance was the highest since that passage from Papeete to Hilo that Arnold and I made in 2008. Unfortunately the winds in the next 24 hours would be more challenging and I would be happy to make 100 miles.

The wind held up for the rest of the day and we were moving along at 6-7 kts. I had expected to shake out the 3rd reef from the mainsail but there was no need. We had a bit sea off the port quarter boosting the boat along but also knocking it around.

I decided to resume with the computer based interactive Spanish course and discovered that I had not transferred the material to the new navigation computer. That led to a busy hour of activity where I had to bring up the backup computer and transfer the data to thumb drives. Part II of the course would not fit on a 4 Gb thumb drive so I then had to find the 16 Gb drive to make the transfer. That took 22 minutes and although the OS assured me that there were hours of battery life left, the machine went into hibernation for lack of power. I hastily had to bring down the nav computer in order to plug the backup computer to boat power. I didn't want to tamper with the navigation computer because of the problems that I had had with the COM5 USB port. The transfer from the thumb drive to the navigation computer took only 4 minutes because I was using a fast USB 3.0 port. While that was happening I dosed the COM5 USB port on the nav computer with a liberal amount of CRC electronic cleaner, and I did the same with the USB connector on the Pactor cable.

To my relief when I booted up the machine everything came up again. When I plugged in the Pactor cable I heard the "ding" signifying that a device had been plugged in, and sure enough the OS could see COM5.

As darkness approached we were still averaging 7 kts to the east. All the wishes for fair winds and following seas were for the moment being fulfilled.

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