Day 35, April 10 - 1500 To Go and Becalmed

We sailed all night to a steadily moderating breeze. I try to avoid adjusting sails at night but several hours after dark I went topside and rolled out more headsail to counter the drop in wind speed which was now at about 15 kts. The wind was from the SSE and much as I would have liked to head directly E I found that the boat traveled better when only slightly into the wind, so I accepted a CMG of 072T throughout the night. In the morning the wind was down to perhaps 13 kts so I rolled out the rest of the sail. By then we were at longitude 085E13, getting close to the turning point of 90E. The course of 072 had in fact been taking us almost directly to Fremantle and I realized that we could maintain this course and reach 90E before reaching 39S, thereby not violating the recommendation of "Ocean Passages". But this was academic because the wind forecast for the past 24 hours had been spot on, suggesting that the expected becalming due to that advancing trough was also accurate. I was anxiously looking forward to the morning's forecasts and wfax with special interest.

The morning forecasts were not good. The Sailmail point forecast predicted weak winds for the next two days. My radio reception from Graham was not good so he emailed his forecast to me. His report looked ahead almost a week and presented a consistently bleak picture of weak and variable winds. The morning's weather fax clearly showed that ridge that Graham had warned me about, with the boat at the leading edge of the ridge that extended from the main high to the NW to a smaller high to the SE. The wfax also showed Tropical Cyclone Victoria to the NW of Australia.

Reception was better during the afternoon session and the forecast had not changed substantially. The ridge would eventually disappear of course but we would have to wait and see how things unfolded.

At noon we were still sailing well, off a 15 kt wind that had just shifted from SE to ESE, which forced me to take the boat more into the wind. Graham told me that I was getting my strong wind from a tiny high to our NE, but that it would disappear soon. He mention a tropical cyclone off Mozambique which would not present any problem to me.

So all I could do was to sail on as long as I could then try to take advantage of any opportunity that came up during the coming few days. I would expect the sea to calm down which would lower the threshold of wind speed for sailing, and if I got desperate enough and the opportunity arose, I was prepared to dig out the MPS spinnaker and put it up for the first time since my first week out of La Paz.

The sun had been out for a couple of hours, which was encouraging.

The noon numbers were good:

POS 39S33, 86E11
NND 119
DMG 3287
DTG 1510

I had managed to keep the boat moving well though sailikng slightly to weather with just the headsail. I was now looking forward to the minor milestone of 1500 miles from Fremantle, and I was pleased to see that we were less than 4 degrees from 90E.

Noon UTC is sunset in these waters so I switched on there masthead tricolor.

At 1400 to the minute we crossed the 1500 nm distance to Fremantle. The wind was still with us, though weak, and we were still moving.

At 1800 it was all over. I was waken by the flogging sail sending shudders throughout the boat. I had reduced sail two hours earlier to keep us sailing but now there was so little wind that the Monitor could not steer and we had whatever breeze there was from our stern. In order to calculate our drift I dropped a marker and recorded its time. It had been a magnificent run of 14 days since 27 March that had taken us 1644 miles at an average distance of 117 miles per day.

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