Saturday 13th February: On passage
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Sat 13 Feb 2016 14:04
The past 24 hours have seen us advancing in generally southerly direction, we're having to stay slightly off a dead run to keep the jib filled and pulling. During the night the wind dropped and backed somewhat to the North to a force 4 so the reefs were removed, only to be put back three hours later when the North Easterly force 6 returned.
At present the wind strength varies from a NE 5 to 7. With 2 reefs in the main and the full jib we are doing up to 10.5 knots when pushed by the waves. this is slightly more speed than the tow generator can manage with. We also feel that poling out the second jib at present would give us no advantages with the slight disadvantage of having a permanent pole and bridle in place; so for now we carry on with the sails set as they are.
Yesterday the generator ran badly and then stopped altogether. Despite a fuel filter change, the system wouldn't prime and so was clearly not getting enough diesel. We have (James did) blown down the fuel pipe into the fuel tank and cleared a blockage. It then primed ok and started and ran fine until the same thing happened again about 30 mins later. We had a similar issue this April with the fuel tank containing some small rubbery pellets. The engine fuel feed from the tank is protected from said pellets by a gauze but the generator fuel pick-up pipe is not. We fear that we didn't find them all in the Spring when investigating this issue and need to reopen the fuel tank. As this means moving the table and digging up the floor we are currently running the engine an hour or so a day to top up batteries as we plan to wait until the seas and winds have gone down before attempting to repair of the generator.
Fiona's notes on boat life. The motion is exhausting when running down wind in F6 and above since with the sea from astern the boat doesn't really settle to a predictable rhythm. We're both finding sleeping quite difficult at present and I am glad that I made enough vegetarian curry to last the first 4 days of the passage. While we settle to life aboard it's handy to have a base meal to which you can add chorizo, fish or pasta to make a varied supper each evening without doing a lot of cooking. There's also plenty of time for introspection as well, despite things taking twice as long to get done. The night watches offer lots of time to think about things. Largely at present revolving around hot showers (La Palma was the last place we got one of these) and how very very big the world is when you crawl round it at a few miles per hour. We've seen aircraft at night, but nothing else since we left Cape Verde.
Flying fish haul this morning only one, but nonetheless we've kept it to try it, grilled I reckon.