Whaaaales!
Gudrun V
Axel Busch
Sat 29 Sep 2012 04:42
What a stressfull sailing day. All the time sails up, sails down, engine on, engine off, tack, reef in, reef out, tack, then all that rain and then on top of it engine trouble ... . Btw, I had a look at that in between sailing stuff, and it actually seems I had too much oil. I removed 3/4 liter, and that solved the problem. Question is: how come? It's not water. So either I put too much oil in last time (but why didn't the alarm go of earlier?) or diesel got into the oil. Or oil from the transmission. Or am I missing something? Have to look some more.
But first there's reason to celebrate: I saw humpback whales! From my boat! While sailing! Isn't that awesome? Almost three years I've been waiting for that :-). I had just tacked, and looked toward Oneata Island to see if I could see the reef in front of it. And instead I saw a plume of water! Fortunately - tataa! - the camera is always ready in the cockpit in a PELI case, and I just managed to get some shots of a "hump" and a fluke before the whales went out of sight. Then I sat there for one hour with the camera in hand, waiting for the two whales to come up again. But no luck. Anyway, still very happy. But wow, that went so fast, I can see how you have to do a lot of watching to have a chance to see a whale out in the Ocean. And to be honest, I'm not doing that much watching *blush*.
But what I saw instead was: S/V Promise, a little catamaran. So funny. Promise left Niue with me, and five days later (is it only 5 days?) we get to this passage at the same time. I took some shots of them, maybe I'm lucky and they took some of Gudrun too. Although I doubt it, it's a boat delivery, and they didn't look like photography was a priority.
Have to complain a little here: This is propably the least miles for effort I've managed on any sailing day ever - 35nm in 17 hours! And just in the time it took me to write that email I had to work in the cockpit 6 times: 3x adjust sails, 1x reefing, 1x unreefing, and finally to take the sails down and start the engine.
Anyway, I'm pretty much through the passage now, after that I'm happy to drift again or whatever. And I saw whales today! Isn't that absolutely amazing? Whaaaales :-)
295nm to go