Light winds and too far south!
Sygitana
Mon 3 Dec 2018 14:28
Light winds all last night which took its toll on our speed and pushed us further south as we tried in vein to keep the main and Genoa filled. mostly being thrown around by the swell which knocks the wind out of the sails. our daily run was 140nM ish, roughly 20 miles less than what we wanted but i'm consoled that others around us will have suffered the same light winds.
i realize now that our pole set up is below standard. the new mast track is already coming loose which i'm not happy about at all. i will need to review this on arrival to St Lucia and get someting more robust in place.
This morning we dropped the genoa sail and sorted out teh chafe on the end of the sheet. cut 30cms off and remade the knot. we also dropped the mainsail to check for chafe in teh halyard. we cut off 30cms of slightly damaged line and remade a knot on the line rather than try to splice the line.
we also inspected areas of wear on the sail and placed several big pathes of sticky back dacron to cover up areas where it had chafed and areas where it looked like it could. i'm annoyed the expensive sticky backed dacron roll i bought from the sailmaker wasnt in the big tube with teh normal darcon. i should have checked on delviery but i'm also cross the sailmaker 'forgot' to add teh dacron but didnt 'forget' to bill me for it. ive had several firms in teh UK who have done generaly a great job but have missed key bits even after i explained what i was planning to do and stressing what i wanted.
We gybed and are now on STB tack on a broad reach making 6.6 ish. thankfully we are making the waypoint so not being pushed north of the line! feels good to be headed in the right direction.
all well onboard. we continue to wonder where our fresh water goes when teh watermaker is running. we finaly ran tank 1 empty. we ran teh watermaker for 3hrs yesterday at 40l/hr. we think its a 120L tank but no sign of it overflowing yet. watermaker is back on now. we are running on tank 2, we have tank 3 and 100L of bottled water so no dramas yet!
feels like we are half way which we maybe time wise but not mileage. 12-13th is best guess arrival date at the moment. more breeze forecast on the run in to the islands so we may post some better days runs in the closing 4 days or so. will need to keep an eye out for squalls soon.
so much to do and think about the amount of downtime we have doesn't seem to equate the 8hrs off in between each watch. from running engine, water maker, cooking, cleaning, general maintenance jobs and being social the time is flying.
we had an early lunch today of bacon,eggs and fresh bread. that always makes everything much better.
right, time to get the weather and daily position reports and see how we are doing. the competative side of this is actually not that easy to deal with and has added additional pressure to me as the navigator to get the routing right and keep up our position in the fleet.
all well onboard.
J,D,M,K,D