Day 43, April 18

Good wind for only half a day and already I was reducing sail.

I studied Graham's weather forecast and saw that the wind speed after the passing of the cold front at about dawn would be 20 knots, higher than what had been predicted by my morning's spot forecast. 20 knots can easily become 22 or 24 kts and I became very uneasy about facing that kind of uncertainty during the night with the amount of sail that I was carrying. One concern was that I knew that I would have to gybe the boat when the front passed over and the wind backed from NW to SW, and I did not want to do it in the dark with so much mainsail up. I decided to reduce sail while there was still daylight and before the seas had built up. I started off by reducing the headsail then I dropped the big slab of sail from 1st reef to 2nd reef. All of that went well and when it was done I felt much better about the situation. The dictum is to reduce sail the first time you think about it and I could not agree more. Regardless of how much I have dithered, every time that I have reduced sail I have felt better afterward.

I had to reduce more than that before the day was out. Just before dark the wind backed to the WSW and dropped to perhaps 10 kts and I encountered the same old problems with the mainsail. I couldn't run too much downwind or the mainsail would blanket the headsail. Worse, the apparent wind dropped when running downwind and the mainsail and boom began to slat from side to side. I knew that I had at least two days of downwind sailing ahead and there would be no place for the mainsail in that run anyway, so just before dark I dropped it. It had served me well during the past two days of light airs with the wind on the beam, and this day with a moderate breeze again on the beam. I gained a full 25 degrees in heading by running with just the headsail. We were headed NE but I wasn't concerned because after the cold front passed we would be heading slightly to the south. Then I looked at the morning's spot forecast and it predicted a wind of 10.7 kts from 094 degrees at this time, exactly what I was experiencing. But that was the only 10+ kt wind in the entire forecast and I could look forward to stronger winds.

We went into the night with the batteries at 12.5V.

Graham told me to expect the cold front at about 1800 so I set the alarm for that time. At 1800 the front had not arrived so I reset the alarm for 1900, but at 1900 there was still no front so I set the alarm again for 2000. Just before the alarm went off I woke up because the wind had picked up and the boat was running smoother through the water. The heading of NNW on the laptop confirmed the wind shift, which must have just happened because the change of course did not yet show on the track. It was Show Time and I went on deck in full battle dress, including sea boots, life vest, sailing gloves, beanie and head torch. Conditions were mild and I expected the gybe to be easy but I had to be prepared to go to the foredeck if the lazy jib sheet had gotten wrapped around a bollard, which is an infrequent occurrence when the inner forestay is in place. I turned on the deck light on the way out.

The gybe went well and I noticed that the wind was not near the 20 kts that Graham had predicted. That suited me fine, as long as we had enough wind for sailing, and besides, we were still near the boundary of the two different winds of the front so it would probably pick up. I then spent 20 minutes fiddling with the Monitor control lines, pumped out the bilge with 50 strokes, then returned to the cabin to reward myself with a cup of hot chocolate. By the time I finished the drink the boat had settle down on a course of ENE at about 5 kts and was riding very smoothly. We had made only 50 miles in the 13 hours since "noon", averaging only 3.8 kts. With the stronger wind we had a good chance at making another 50 miles in the remaining 11 hours of the sailing day and to do that we would need to average 4.5 kts.

I had a quiet morning. The batteries began the day at 12.3/12.4 volts, so they had held their own in the last 24 hours. I did a bit of investigative work on the engine (more on that perhaps tomorrow), reinstated the starboard running backstay so that it could help support the mast, and studied a bit of Spanish.

At the end of the sailing day the numbers were:

POS 38S46, 96E09
NND 101 nm
DMG 3781 nm
DTG 1042 nm

Once more we had just managed to make 100 miles for the day, and it had been almost directly toward Fremantle.

The weather fax showed everything back in order to my mind. There was a big and well defined high to my WNW and lows with their associated fronts sweeping across our south, all contributing to W,SW, and S winds.

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