Day 13: All change please
Moonshiner
Tue 30 May 2023 16:58
SOG 7 COG 248
TWD 120 TWS 15
It’s been 24hrs of non stop sail changes as the wind dances around us…so much for the trades!
It was my watch last night which began with the Yankee and main sail just about both filling with that annoying apparent wind angle of 140degrees. As the wind dropped off but with a left over swell, the Yankee would fill and unfill. We’ve been making an effort to go in a straight line to avoid wasted miles but with this wind angle, and in the absence of a symmetrical spinnaker, we always end of choosing speed vs course. Anyway, I was feeling lazy so I pressed a button on our autohelm remote control from the comfort of my bed and brought us up on the wind.
Then I couldn’t sleep as I watched us veer off course having set the autohelm to ‘wind’ which had backed 40degrees! At 11pm we jibed the main sail and went onto a run. This was our worst night yet, neither of us slept as the wind dropped and filled causing the battens to crack with each roll of a wave….urrgh!
When I woke at 5am, the wind had returned to its expected direction of 100degrees so I gybed the main back. No sooner had I done this, it returned to 60degrees…I cursed and went back to bed leaving us veering off once more. At 7am I woke Ben up with the news that we needed to take down the main, roll away the Yankee, hoist and pole out the asymmetric and re-launch the Yankee on the port side with a pole….not the breakfast in bed he was hoping for.
So with poled out asymmetric and Yankee, we thought that was us for the day. Since then, we’ve put the Yankee away, then the asymmetric, put out the stay sail to let a squall pass, then re-launch the Yankee with the main…and here we are. My arms are actually pretty done in after all that, luckily the in house masseuse is excellent.
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