Las Palmas Tomorrow
Dubbel Zout at Sea
Nik Ormseth
Thu 5 Jan 2023 07:42
| We’re about a day from Las Palmas now, having left Albufeira about noon on January 1. Making blog updates — doing anything, really — at sea is much harder than from land. The motion of the boat is constant and in all directions — pitching, rolling, yawing with the waves. Even if it doesn’t make you seasick (and it did make me that way for 2.5 days) it makes even the simplest task an exercise in bracing yourself and stashing things so they don’t slide around or clank constantly. We’ve found our share of things that we’ll need to fix or improve in Las Palmas next week, but as a sailing boat, DZ has shown herself to be fantastic. She shouldered through the first 20 hours from Albufeira, upwind and through lumpy seas. Since then, we’ve been on a run or a deep reach, with the seas mostly behind us. In all of it, she has steered easily and handled both wind and wave. Tuesday night the wind was a steady 20-24 knots from the north. We were on a deep reach, with the main reefed down and the genoa, partly furled, poled out on the same side. We averaged 7-8 knots, and on at least three occasions got above 11 as we surfed down waves — a pretty exciting sail!  |