Day 15 - Squalls and counting down miles
ARC Crossing 2017
Mon 18 Dec 2017 03:35
181nm towards St Lucia is a record! Much excitement, especially as the midnight - midnight distance run will be higher. Sorry for the late blog post, a couple of people have commented 'you must be really busy' which is partly true, but in the day, 'busy' can include catching up on sleep. Overnight we run a 3 hour watch system, with one person on watch, and a second on standby in case of manoeuvers that need two (or more people). If the weather is really benign, standby can be 'asleep in clothes in bunk' or 'asleep in clothes in saloon' but it still means broken sleep, even though if we can we do reefs and the like at watch change time.
Standby can move from asleep to full on pretty quickly. Last night was a case in point. Ecover was deep reaching with full main and genoa (Genoa poled out, which is a bit strange but is really the only thing stopping the leech blowing completely) doing about 8kn in 16-18kn of wind, which was pretty near perfect when we got hit by a squall about an hour before dawn. We run the radar at night to pick up rain showers, but this squall didn't start raining until it was on top of us, so by the time we realised what was going on it was too windy to really do much apart from clip in and hang on. The wind got up to F7-8, with one gust into F9. One of the benefits of Ecover being originally a round the world yacht is that she has a hull shape designed to sail in that kind of weather, and so the autopilot managed to hang on without rounding up, and the instruments say she peaked at 12.1kn over the ground.
Of course something had to break, and fortunately it was only the pole downhaul. It takes a lot to snap dyneema (this was in the knot) but it was probably a good thing the genoa got depowered. Very flappy, but easily solved once the squall went through and dawn came.
The other excitment is that the the mainsheet winch started making a funny noise and not working so well, which turned out to be a hydraulic leak. Messy and hard to fix. Fortunately we aren't planning on tacking or gybing more than twice more, but a certain amount of ingenuity (& about 5 hours in the stern locker by Tony) has got us a patch for the hydraulic line which at least reduces the fountain of pressure loss such that we can use it in an emergency, plus a workable temporary 2nd mainsheet. Duct tape couldn't fix this one. It is epoxy paste, pot noodle pot and jubilee clips. Who knew that epoxy mixed with turmeric goes purple?
So when it isn't being exciting, there is other boat maintenance, food and various versions of 'are we there yet' to occupy us, along with reading, movies and Arran's guitar playing. Sadly we haven't seen any dolphins since putting together an underwater GoPro mount, but have begun to see more birds. Dinner last night was spaghetti bolognese, and given it was ARC final party night in Rodney Bay we had a nice bottle of Ribera to go with it.
At time of writing (0330 GMT on Monday) we are 266nm to go, although with running dead downwind right now are actually on a course direct to Barbados, 180nm away. Guess we'll have to change course in the morning! Currrently on track to get into Rodney Bay late morning on Tuesday. Our on site reconaissance (Sam) reports that a place at the marina called the Bread Basket does happy hour from 7am until midnight, so I guess I know where we'll be!