DAY 26 - Gybing the jib...........

I sailed for the rest of the afternoon downwind with a small jib pulling the boat along.

I checked my Sailmail during that time and got more great information from Allan Miell way Down Under at Kangaroo Island, South Australia on the technique of using two sails for downwind runs. He gave up flying kites (ie spinnakers) 40 years ago in his first year of solo sailing when he got one wrapped around his keel. He recommends poling out the regular jib and pairing it with a second sail, "free standing" (i.e. not hanked) right up forward next to the headstay. The sails do not have to match in size. He gave me great insight into why and how it will steer the boat and how the forward drive is down low, whereas a spinnaker puts a lot of load at the top of the mast, making the stern lighter and stressing the back stay. He saved me a lot of experimenting time by explaining why hanking the seoond sail in the inner forestay is unlikely to work. I will pick my day and try this out using my staysail. If I get satisfactory results I'll try to get a second hand larger light sail for the job. (I've got 2 spare jibs in the sail locker but they are too big and heavy for this application.)

Another great help from Allan's advice: I no longer feel like a wimp for not wanting to fly solo kites. I've got two little-used spinnakers in my locker: an asymmetric and an MPS, both hardly used. I'll want to keep them for possible use back in Austalia but for now it would be great to ship at least one of them home to free up space and reduce weight. On the other hand, you never know. In the next two years I could find myself on a passage or even a day sail where I've got enough crew to give the kite a go.

After my 7.30 PM radio session I noted that the wind had veered and the boat was again heading ESE. At 8.30 PM I the wind had not backed so I decided to gybe. I managed to do this just in time for the 9 PM session with Chris. The boat was now headed to the northern end of Vancouver Island. Richard, by the way, was only 128 nm from home. Yesterday was his 43rd day at sea.

I went to bed with the plan of rising at 2-hour intervals in order to deal with any wind shifts. At midnight I saw that the boat was headed NNW and after doing some mental calculations concluded that another gybe was warranted. I did this and soon had Pachuca headed almost directly for Cape Flattery.

At the 4 AM check the boat was headed SSE. I gybed the boat yet again and once again was headed for Cape Flattery at 5.5 kt on a no. 2 jib. This latest wind shift had been a big one so I zoomed up the boat's track and saw that she had traveled only 2 nm SSE. This is the sort of penalty the single hander has to pay.

I find that gybing the jib is more difficult and risky than reefing the mainsail. The first thing that I must do is to check that the weather (ie loose) jib sheet is free. About 50% of the time it has wrapped around the sampson post or anchor windlass. This means a trip past the mast to the fordeck, adjusting the jib car along the way. (The risk here is mitigated by the jack line and the "Dieter Line" chest-level perimeter of rope from the cockpit to the inner forestay and back.) Then the jib must be rolled almost completely in, which means simultaneously loosening the jib sheet and pulling on the roller line. This having been done then I load up the weather sheet on the winch and pass the end of it to the steering area, then partially unload the lee sheet and hang on to that while I get behind the wheel. Then I disengage the self steering, turn the wheel to execute the gybe and as the boat crosses the wind I have to manage the wheel, let off the weather sheet, and bring on the new lee sheet while paying out the roller furling line. Give me a one-step-at-a-time mainsail reef job any time.

During the morning I successfully downloaded 15 faxes with no errors. Having given the favorable outcome I'll now confess that I was naughty and downloaded the weather faxes with the GPS receiver connected to the system. I had reinstated the GPS the previous noon in order to put out my Yotreps position report (too lazy to manually key in the numbers) and decided that it would do no harm to leave it connected until the start of the next series of fax downloads. I forgot to do this and when I did remember I decided to leave the GPS in place. I agreed with Jim that the load from the GPS was minimal and besides, I had run a series of fax downloads without the GPS and still gotten the error.

I am fairly confident that we have fixed the problem. The baud rate between the Acer and the Pactor modem has been reduced from the maximum of 115200 to 57600, which is plenty considering that there are 3 levels below that, down to 9600. I have certainly seen no degradation in performance.

The wind and weather, by the way, looked pretty good for the next few days. The 96-hour forecast predicted gale conditions off the Oregon coast but happily I would be well north of that.

At noon we were at 46.23N, 133.34W. Our 24-hour noon-noon distance was 102 nm and we were 378 nm from Cape Flattery.