Closing in on 1/3
African Innovation
AJ
Sat 8 May 2010 20:46
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We are cruising along in a slow, but steady
fashion.
Day 6 looked like this:
We logged 142 nm
Our average speed was 5.9 knots
We ran the engines for acombined of 8
hours.
Average wind speed was between 10 -
12 knots
At 18:00 yesterday we had 2202 nm to go before we
make landfall. The reason we ran the engines so much, was that we
needed to charge the batteries and because we were experimenting with different
sails.
We tried sailing using only gennaker, we here tried
both of them, to see the speed difference. The smaller one is a about a knot and
a half slower than the big one. Sailing with main and genoa is a little bit
slower than sailing with the main and genoa. We were hoping that we could sail
with 2 reefs in the main and the gennaker, but the main created too much
turbulence, so the gennaker kept collapsing. In the end we continued using
only the gennaker.
We also had to repair the gennaker, because the
hard ring on the sock, basically the way we deploy and retrieve the gennaker is
slightly damaged. The ring has probably hit the mast a few times and small parts
of it has been knocked off. These spots on the ring are quite sharp and they
have damaged the gennaker in numerous places, so yesterday we spent 2 hours
repairing the damage with sail tape. Unfortunately the sail tape we used was old
and in a few places it has already peeled off. ARGH ... There's nothing like
doing the same job twice.
In the evening Martin and I celebrated us having
sailed 1/4 of the way, by watching Lord of War on my laptop, while sharing some
of our candy stash. We basically shared a Twix bar, 4 Oreos, 4 chocolate
biscuits and a small bag of banana chips ... It was a true feast!
Today we are sailing onwards in quiet and calm
conditions, definitely not setting any records, but having a very smooth and
relaxing ride. We now have 2087 nm to go before we get to Hiva Oa. In 87
nautical miles we'll be 1/3 of the way!
- Andreas
4:07.51S 104:25.49W
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