Day 28 - Passage to the Caribbean
Misterx
Tue 29 Apr 2025 01:10
28/04/25
8:30 pm
Day 28
North Atlantic Ocean
DTD to Trinidad: 892 NM (87NM)
Another day of watching the wind instrument, but to no avail, it never went down any further than 16 knots of wind... gusts taking us up well into the mid 20's... far too much to contemplate putting the genoa up in the roller furler system. Not with this sea state anyway, 2.3m swell, we are still very much shaken up. Our average boat speed went down a bit but not massively, only 4nm difference with yesterday's 24 hours run. We know we have a bit of adverse current, we are trying to get to a point where it is actually going with us, that would help. We did waggle the rudder today, just in case we have some seaweeds caught on it, that would make it drag and make us go slower! Not sure it worked, there might not be seaweed so far down. It looks very much like it is floating on the surface of the sea.
We were discussing the fact that had we had the hanked on system instead of the roller furler on Mr X, the genoa would have been in place ages ago... no matter how strong the wind and how bad the sea was.... back in our racing days, I spent much of my time a the pointy end, changing sails, up and down, at the mere whiff of a change of wind going up and down... crawling up the deck, pulling and pushing the sail bag, securing it to the guard wire. Getting the working genoa down, without getting it in the sea, undoing the mousquetons, securing the sail to the guard wire, opening the bag just enough that i could get access to the mousquetons on the new genoa, and getting them fixed on the forestay, tying the sheets on... fidgety job, especially in a heaving sea, waves splashing over more often than not (we seemed to be going up wind a lot in those days!). Putting the halyard on... and someone back in the cockpit would have the thing up before I came back in... Done!
The roller furler has got many advantages but putting it up at sea in windy conditions is just difficult as the sail has to be fed in forestay and pulled up as it is fed into the system. Not easy, it could go very wrong.
Water in the bilges and Sargasso weed situation, no change... lots of bailing out and de-weeding...
Watching eh miles go down...
M