Day 84 - Leg 5 Day 10 at Sea 'Sailing and Fishing'
Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Wed 16 Sep 2015 07:00
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On Monday morning, the wind started to pick up
so at 11.00 we hoisted the sails, keeping one eye nervously on the
genoa. Fortunately, the new patches were holding up well so off we
went. As the wind was coming from behind us, we poled out the genoa on one
side and had the main sail out on the other which allows us to sail pretty
much directly downwind. You can set your autopilot to sail to a wind
angle, so if the wind changes direction, the autopilot will automatically alter
your course to the new wind direction. There is also an alarm so, if the
wind changes by more than, say, 15 degrees, you are made aware if this. In
theory, without an alarm, if the wind were to slowly turn 180 degrees, you could
find yourself sailing back from where you had come from although, hopefully,
somebody would notice this happening!!
Now that the Trade Winds had apparently arrived, we have
a number of decisions to make over the coming days. We have 870 litres of
fuel remaining, 2,900 miles to Mindelo in the Cape Verdes and the doldrums
between us and there. This should take us around 16 days so the question
is, 'do we stop off at St Helena or Ascension for fuel or do we still aim
for Mindelo?' We run the generator around 4 hours a day to charge the
batteries, at 2 litres an hour, so if we sail all the way, this would be around
128 litres. We know that we will need to motor through the doldrums, and
the engine also charges the batteries, so say 100 litres for the
generator. We may have to motor for around 200 miles through the doldrums,
so at 5.8 litres an hour at an RPM of 1,700 which will give us 7 knots of speed,
so that is around 170 litres of fuel. Also, I want to keep 100 litres in
reserve, for the approach to Mindelo so, we have 500 litres of fuel for
additional motoring which is the equivalent of 600 miles or 3.5
days.
We have made the decision not to stop at St Helena as it
is too close so, at some point, we will need to make the call - stop off at
Ascension for fuel, which will take us around 3 days to get there, clear in and
out and take on fuel, or keep going to Mindelo, and hope that the trade winds
hold. The point of no return will come as we are level with Ascension
Island around 21 September, or 10 days before Mindelo. All we can do is
hope that the trade winds hold between now and then, in which case we will not
have used any fuel for motoring and will carry on or, if we have to motor for a
couple of days, we will stop in Ascension.
Today, Wednesday, I decided to put the fishing line out,
and within a minute of doing so, had hooked a fish. I reeled it to within
50 metres of the boat at which point it jumped, twisted and spat the hook
out. Over the next hour, this was repeated 5 times. We reeled in the
lure to check that the hooks were OK, and they seemed to be, but
eventually we gave up. We will try a different hook next time to see
if this makes a difference.
The Trade winds have been pretty consistent over the
past couple of days, and the waves are only 1 - 3 metres and coming pretty much
from behind us, so we have been covering 160 - 180 miles a day, without too much
rocking and rolling. Fingers crossed that this holds up over the next week
or so.
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