Another Tough Night with Good Progress

I had a feeling that the night was going to be rough and unfortunately I was correct.

At about 7 PM I paused the motion picture Patton and moved to the navigation table to make my second Sailmail transmission for the night. (On the first transmission I send out a request for a grib file and on the second I get the result.) Then the boat began to heel, the rigging started to shudder, and we started gaining speed. I watched the wind speed hit 42 knots by which time the boat was on her ear, and the rig was shuddering worse than ever. The little Acer computer that I was using to watch the movie whizzed off the main table taking the external disc drive with it and fortunately landed on the bunk. Then the hail started, accompanied by a bright flash and a sharp clap of thunder. I unplugged the laptops to let them run on batteries then shut down the chart plotter. By then I had noted with relief that the boat was holding its angle to the wind and our boat speed had not gotten much above 7 knots.

By the time I got my wet weather gear on the worst was over. I heard another clap of thunder which seemed farther away than the first one. I turned the chart plotter back on, started the radar, and saw rain bands ahead and to starboard, several miles away. Although the boat had coped through the worst of it I was anxious to reduce headsail but wisely waited another 5 minutes when the wind speed dropped to 25 knots. Even then it was very difficult to roll the sail in and I don't know how I would have coped had there been more headsail out. I then used the spotlight to check the sails, rigging, and steering and everything appeared to be in order. I went down below and watched another 20 minutes of the movie just to make sure that the netbook and external drive had survived their flight through the air.

I went over the incident and concluded that what saved the day were the low profile of the boat, its superb hull form and ballast ratio, and the short sail that we were carrying. A little more freeboard, a little more windage, a bit more tender boat, a bit more sail aloft could have turned the incident into a knockdown. Had I had the mainsail up even at the second reef I would have had a major problem.

Then we settled in for a night of running on a broad reach with the storm trysail and rolled in headsail before an apparent wind gusting to 30 knots, suggesting a true wind of closer to 35 knots. There was lots of rocking and rolling with water regularly sweeping the deck. I tried getting some sleep without success because of the agitation and worry about shipping. I was particularly disturbed by the sound of the anchor chain sliding back and forth across the deck.

At midnight I decided to do something about that chain. I put on my wet weather gear and went topside holding a shopping bag that contained wire cutters and an adjustable wrench. I was wearing my unreliable head torch that I had coaxed into working. It was pretty wild out there but fortunately the anchor was on the weather side of the deck so that the wind and spray would push me to the center of the boat. The anchor was at the mast, so I was fairly safe kneeling there with the shroud at my back. The plan was to remove the shackle that joined the chain to the anchor and then the hard part, crawl forward to the bollard and unwind the chain, then crawl on to the windlass just behind the chain locker and feed the chain into the locker through the hawse pipe. I wasn't too crazy about crawling that far forward. The deck was narrow, curved, slippery, and a bad combination of events to send me sliding under the leeward rail. I would have done it if I'd had to but I was able to do a work around that should tide me until morning. I had tied a rope from the chain to a deck fitting near the toe rail to stretch the chain so that it would not slide around. This had worked fine to date but the heavy rolling and a slack rope had proven too much. I tightened that rope as hard as I could to stretch the chain then tied it off. I crawled back to the cockpit and inside the cabin I was pleased to hear no sound from the chain above.

I then checked the chart plotter and spotted what appeared to be a hard target 14 miles off the starboard bow. I put the cross hairs on it and watched. Slowly the blip was moving south. Then the AIS ship symbol popped up next to the blip. The target was a ship which would pass 8 miles behind me. That was OK, but it could have easily been a fishing boat with no AIS equipment, leaving me guessing about his danger to me. With all of the traffic around the radar had become more important to me with each passing day. However, to be useful it must be watched, which explains my reluctance to get some serious sleep.

At 2 AM I was able to begin hour long stretches of real sleep. At 7 AM I got up, made one final check of the radar, then shut it down to conserve power because the battery bank was down to 12.1 V. I had made a 2-hour charging run with the engine the previous day and it appeared that another 2 hour run would be required this and subsequent days. The boat was moving amazingly smoothly at 5.5-6.5 knots, although every few minutes a large wave would slam into the hull. I had managed to keep the boat 50 miles off the coast. Just before 2 AM I had noticed that the wind had backed taking us directly north, which meant closing in on the coast. I went out and tweaked Jeff to give me another 15 degrees to starboard, still allowing the headsail to get clean air and not be blanketed by the trysail.

I thought of the previous night and the current situation and concluded that the wind had been very fortunate for me. After weeks of watching a permanent High off this part of the coast I had expected to be beating against 15 knot head winds. Instead I was running fast before a strong wind which according to the latest grib file would persist until midnight, as far ahead that the grib file could see. It was going to be a good 24-hour run and it looked like the next 24 hours would be good too - for speed if not comfort.

I stuck my head out for a look around and saw that conditions were still fairly wild. The wind was running at 26-30 knots and the following seas were high enough to break into white water. Once in a while there would be a wave larger than the rest, shaped like a pyramid and steep, that would break hard. It was these waves that were probably slamming into the boat. I wondered if the south set of the current meeting the strong SW wind wasn't exacerbating the situation.

I had expected the sail to Brazil to be easy, but once again circumstances had forced me into winter sailing, and this was the price to be paid. To cheer myself up I thought of what life would have been like had I been trapped in the Falklands/Malvinas for the winter. I can see it now. The boat would have been on a mooring and to escape the danger and discomfort of motoring to and from shore in the Zodiac I probably would have moved into the pub. There I would have gotten to know the locals while I got snozzled every night, waiting for Spring. That fear of entrapment had been one of the reasons why I sailed past the islands and on to Argentina.

At 9 AM I went to the cockpit to start the engine. When I reached into the lazarette to open the exhaust valve I saw immediately the solution to a mystery. Immediately after the "knockover" of the previous night I began to get the strong odor of a hydrocarbon of some sort. It didn't smell like diesel so I figured that one of my containers of thinners had tipped over. I looked into the large plastic box containing the thinners and solvents but could not find the problem. Fortunately the smell got weaker and seemed to disappear. What happened was that the 5 liter container containing mixed outboard motor fuel had lots its vent cap and fuel had dribbled out. Fortunately the container remained upright or otherwise the fuel would have percolated down into the bilge, setting up an explosive situation. The gas detector works and would have shut off the LPG solenoid, but the life in the cabin would have become unpleasant and the stove would have been out of commission. I didn't mess around looking for the tiny cap that was probably on the leeward side behind the gas cylinders. I tipped all of the fuel into the sea and from now on no fuel whatsoever will be stored in the lazarette. I've got 20 liters of gasoline on the deck and have plenty of outboard motor oil so I'll mix fuel as I need it. The tank of the outboard motor is full, giving me a couple of hours of running time.

While I was in the cockpit the boat lurched and I grabbed the windward running back stay. It was still taut from when I set it the previous afternoon. This was a welcome experience for me. The rope running back stays that came with the boat would never stay tight for more than a few minutes. I came to realize that the ropes were stretching probably because they were the wrong kind of rope for the job. All I had were make believe running backstays. The decision to replace them at MdP was a wise one, even though it cost me an arm and a leg. Now I can use them to properly support the mast at all times. They should also enable me to keep the inner forestay tauter when I'm using the staysail.

At 9.30 AM our position was 29S57, 048W56. In 24 hours we had made good a distance of 127 miles. We were 645 miles from MdP, 144 miles from Florianopolis ahead, and 417 miles from Ilha Bella, our destination. We had just crossed latitude 30 S and were now in the 20's! The barometer had risen two points to 1015 hPa.

In the early afternoon the wind dropped to the mid teens so I rolled out headsail to keep up our boat speed. Two hours later the wind went back to the mid 20's so I rolled in the headsail back to about the same area as that of the trysail. I decided that as long as I was up I might as well stow that chain. Soon I emerged from the cabin fully dressed for wet weather and with my tools in hand. The job went as planned as was so much easier in the light of day. As I kneeled before the hawse pipe feeding chain with my right hand while firmly gripping the rail with my left I remembered why I had just spent $1000 upgrading the rails to 5mm wire. Anyway, there would be no more spooky rattling of chains in the night.

At 5 PM we were at 29S25, 048W30, moving comfortably on a good course at 4.7 knots with a lumpy following sea. If the wind stayed down at the high teens I would probably add a bit more headsail for the night. In any event, I was looking forward to a much quieter night than last night.

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