Chagos to Gan - Day 6

Vega
Hugh and Annie
Mon 16 May 2022 04:46


 08:02.80S 65:33.24E
The more astute of you may have noticed that I forgot to add a position yesterday. As a result you may think we have sailed to where we are in more or less a straight line. This is day 6 of what the passage planning gribs have been showing as a 7 or 8 day passage. We still have another 6 days before we will reach Victoria in the Seychelles! We are not alone in complaining that the weather gribs are only a rough guide and are useless for detailed passage planning. At no point have they shown the 50 mile wide band of westerly wind and squalls along the top edge of the trade wind. As a result we have lost time to unexpected weather conditions meaning big detours and slow sailing.
We are now actually in the SE trades and simply have to follow these to the west and then the north up to Victoria. What we hadn’t appreciated - but could have done with splashing out on more data - is that we are following a wide band of squally rain right along our route!
The good news is that the 150% genoa is now coming into its own. The wind is steady at around 15kts from the SE. We have been agonising over the best sail plan to follow the wind with it coming from the starboard quarter, sometimes the port quarter for most of the time. We had opted for reefed mainsail and genoa, although have been poling out the staysail from time to time. The pole is rigged and ready to go whenever needed. However we were finding that the genoa would set on the same side as the mainsail so chose this combination, gibing as and when required. Yesterday the wind went to the NE with the oncoming squalls and so we gybed onto the starboard tack. As the squalls came through the wind veered to the east and south east and so we spent half the day sailing north again. This kept us in the unstable air above the trade wind proper and we then had to sail south to get back down into the trades. By sunset we had stable SE wind but the Hydrovane was having a hard time maintaining a westerly course, the boat turning up into the wind with the squalls. So, we dropped the mainsail for the night and immediately found both no loss of speed and the ability to easily hold a westerly course. As a result we will sail under the genoa, reefing it in the squalls when we get wind up to 25kts and easily gybing  if we need to on the way to Victoria.
The reluctant navigator is not having her happiest passage. It is slow, the weather is shitty and we both feel more isolated and uncomfortable out in the Indian Ocean than ever we did in the Pacific. We had six Boobies roosting and squabbling overnight. Today their shit is everywhere and has stained our new bimini. They’ll be chased of with the fishing net this evening.
The wind speed and direction indicator was playing up yesterday. I put this down to a Booby roosting on the mast top fitting overnight. I tried everything to move it on - flashing light, banging on the mast, even the fog horn. All to no avail. Today it seems to be working again. The plotter is still playing up. The installed map covers an area from Africa all the way through to the South China Sea. No problem as far as Chagos but it is not showing the detailed mapping for the Seychelles. Looks like we will be using our iPads when we get there. We could try synching my iPad with the plotter but that would risk neither showing the detailed mapping.
Onwards and westwards…………



SY Vega