Day 20, March 26 - Back to Normal

The Sailmail service has been getting steadily weaker over the last week. Last night I managed to get the blog out with great difficulty but after repeated tries on various frequencies over the optimal span of 2 hours I was unable to receive 3 messages that were waiting for me. Fortunately Sailmail sends out messages in the outbox before receiving messages, and fortunately I seem to have a good strong transmitter which outperforms my reception. It is likely that the service will improve as I move to the east an am able to use higher frequencies. In the meantime, good folks, much as I enjoy reading incoming messages, please hold them to a minimum until the situation improves.

I got through the night OK hove to. I got up a couple of times an looked around in the moonlight and saw no problem. At dawn the wind was still at 25 kts and I saw that we had drifted 19 miles to the north to 41S51. That represents a surprising 3 kts of leeway, even though whenever I looked over the side of the boat it did not appear to be moving. The current must have been one component of this drift, and it would also be affecting ice.

At 3 AM, one hour after dawn, I faced the task of bringing down the mainsail. The wind was at 25 kts from the SW and the seas were huge. I used the engine to get just enough steerage to put us almost directly into the seas that must have been at least 4 meters high. I then let fly the main halyard and raced forward to bring the sail down. The operation had its moments but 30 minutes later we were sailing downwind with the jib pulled out to about a size 3, making close to kts. By then I had tied the boom off to the cockpit frame and put four strap around the sail and boom.

I have been spending most of my time in full battle dress except the life harness with the main hatch half open and me standing so that I can look out for ice. That is a tricky task in these huge seas, and I really don't know how a lump of low flat ice will stand out against the big white caps appearing all over the place. All I can do is look for any anomalies in the pattern of the sea.

At 10 AM I reduced sail and slowed the boat. I had been sailing aggressively all day, making 6.5-7.5 kts, hitting 8 kts during squalls. But it had been a wild ride with the boat thrown from pillar to post by the big seas. Now we were only 3 miles short of 41S and with the prospect of continuing SSW winds into the following day I saw no urgency to rush. I had been on watch almost continuously all day keeping a sharp eye for evidence of ice but saw none. Spot checks with radar had revealed nothing.

At 1130 we crossed latitude 41S and were now in the 40's! Soon after that I gybed the boat. All day long we had been on a port tack headed 10 degrees or so west of north. The wind had backed another 20 degrees in the last few hours giving us a heading of 330. The gybe gave us a course of 020, still to the north, but biased toward Australia. The reduced sail had made the gybe a very easy and gentle one and now we were making 6 kts off of a 20 kt wind. The sea was calming down, and so was I. All very satisfactory.

Our noon numbers were:

POS 40S56, 49E02
NND 99 nm
DMG 1521
DTG 3268

After the last 24 hours we were closer to Cape Town and 18 miles farther away from Fremantle. (Small price to pay for safety.)

At sunset I did one last scan of the horizon, did last probe with the radar, then closed myself in the cabin for a normal night of sailing. Thanks to a wonderful SW wind I had managed to put 2.5 degrees, or 126 miles, between the boat and the two icebergs. I had spent the last two sailing days almost continually at the spray dodger scanning the horizon for any sign that might indicate ice and saw nothing. We were now at 40S46, in the northern half of the band representing the sailing route suggested by "Ocean Passages".

I had been thinking during the day what approach I would take once we were in the vicinity of 40S and rightly or wrongly I have taken the view that the iceberg encounters were 'over there' and I have left them behind. The 40's latitude will have to stand on its own. Ice was always a risk even at this latitude, but from what I've read, the risk is much lower at 40S than 43S. To get beyond the historical limit of sightings of ice I would have to go above 35S, totally unthinkable if I want to reach Australia in reasonable time. It is all about risk, as it was in Drake Passage and the sail to the east side of the Falklands. (Fortunately I never saw ice in those regions.) So as far as I'm concerned, I'm back to normal sailing.

We went into the night doing a modest 5 kts to NNW off a wind much weaker than the forecast 25 kts. I would maintain this course until reaching the vicinity of 40S then head east as best as I could.

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