Day 17, March 23

The boat sailed comfortably into the night on a port tack with her triple reefed mainsail and staysail. Even though we were sai.ling hard to weather into an 18-20 kt wind and making 3.5-4 kts, inside the cabin the boat felt more like she was hove to; so much so that when the opportunity arises I will investigate heaving to with and without the staysail. I kept an eye on the chart plotter until 9 PM but there was only the slightest hint of a backing wind and we were still tracking to the SE, so I went to bed feeling relaxed.

I was up at midnight to see that we were still heading SE so returned to bed.

When I opened my eyes again it was daylight and saw that it was 3 AM. I went to the chart plotter and saw that we were heading east! Coffee could wait. Topside I was surprised at the benign state of the sea, perhaps because the wind had been steadily clocking back throughout the night. Now that I had the measure of the conditions I rolled out some headsail, twice actually, because I saw way too much fluttering along the leech of the sail, rolled it in, then carefully worked my way along the leeward side of the deck to move the sheet block forward just over half way along the track. When the boat had settled down our speed was 6.1-6.2 kts and we had gained a good 10 degrees in heading. Twice I adjusted the Monitor to take us ever so slightly off the wind, to take some of the edge of the pounding into the waves. One of the benefits of not having pushed the boat hard toward the SE overnight was that we were now at a comfortable latitude of 43S18 and there was no need to claw our way to the north. I fact I was willing to ease off a bit more on heading ESE, but for now the boat was doing OK heading E hard to weather. The Monitor loves sailing to weather. I noticed all night and this morning that it has been doing very little work.

At the laptop our track for the last 18 hours looked like a sharply peaked mountain, with level terrain on the left abruptly rising at 45 degrees in a straight line then at the peak abruptly changing to almost vertical with the slope curving gently and with remarkable smoothness back to level. This of course reflected the tack into the steady backing of the wind and it was another lesson in the limitation of point forecasts. Graham's weather forecasts are invaluable and indispensable to the safety of this boat, but they give snapshots of expected conditions every 6 hours with no indication of the times or rate of change. There was nothing wrong with last night's wind predictions, but in that case the changes were imperceptible. (Having said that, Graham gives me great ancillary information of the location of highs and lows as well as the expected passage of cold fronts with their abrupt wind shifts.)

At 3 AM we had made 60 miles from our last noon position, but it was to the SE and not toward our destination. I hoped to make 40 or 50 miles directly toward Fremantle before the coming noon.

In the early SAMMNet session Graham predicted northerly winds through to tomorrow at 6 AM. They would slowly increase from their 20 kts and peak at 6 PM at 25-30 kts and thereafter begin to moderate. He gave me the coordinates of the latest advancing cold front, expected to pass over me 0600-1200 tomorrow, bringing a change in wind from NNW to SSW. I would make the most of today's winds and gradually wind in the headsail and deal with the 30 kt wind with only the staysail up front, ready to drop it if things got out of hand. Thank heaven and thank Steve and North Sails for that third reef.

On the chart I could see that we were past the Mozambique Channel and were passing under Madagascar 1000 miles to the north.

I noticed that the topping lift was taking the load of the mainsheet rather than the leech of the mainsail so I visited the mast to sort that out. While there I had a good look around. The leeward shrouds felt OK for tension. All else looked OK.

Graham's lunchtime forecast was for variable winds tomorrow, but that at midnight I could expect SW at 20-25.

At noon UTC I got the following numbers:

POS 43S18, 45E31
NND 113 nm
DMG 1391 nm
DTG 3404 nm

At 1500 the sun was setting and we went into the night making close to 7 kts due E.

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