avionbianca   Blog for s/v Avion

]

Day 4

Getting Into the Routine of Things

Day 4 6:00 A.M. (1765 Miles to Hawaii)

I’m not sure if my body has gotten used to this 4 hours on 4 hours off rotation or has simply given in to what it realizes as an inevitability. I awoke in a great mood and immediately started telling stories to Kent and David, my two watch mates. I explained to Kent that he had accidentally found himself last night in the middle of the only excitement of the night, he vaguely remembered something happening when he went to use the head in the middle of his rest period. Awe, an opportunity to embellish a story!

After coming on watch at 100 P.M. the winds were decreasing from 15 knots fluctuating around 10 knots. We were still in a broad reach running the jib topper. The sky is still overcast with an occasional large dark cloud kicking up some turbulence so every now and then the winds would gust up to 18 to 20 knots. In the dark it was hard to tell which cloud was a thin lower level cloud and which were the larger cumulous with weather generating capacity. Kent had gone down replaced by Nico and was in the process of embellishing his own story about a family every 4th of July that was learning how to sink a kit sailboat and year after year he would come to his rescue. In the middle of the story I asked if he would like to relieve me at the helm since I had been driving for close to 1 hours and was getting a little bug eyed trying to concentrate on the compass reading and wind direction to maximize boat speed. Nico said that he was just about ready to go change out the jib top with the A 1 /2 (our largest asymmetrical spinnaker). The reason for the suggested change was because during Nico’s entire story the wind was consistently blowing around 7.5 knots causing the jib topper to flog more than we would like (a flogging sail is a slow sail). Again the process is to raise the spinnaker then douse the jib top. The jib top is a very large sail requiring two people foredeck to secure it. Luckily we had an extra hand with John on deck so he went forward to help Nico while Dave controlled the lines and I attempted to keep the boat under control. Why would that be a problem with only 7.5 knots of wind?

Unfortunately this proved to be a major challenge because just as the spinnaker went up the wind increased to 20 knots due to one of those unseen cumulus clouds. This sail is rated for no more than 12 knots; obviously we were way over powered by a significant amount. When a boat is over powered its normal behavior is to round up and with that much sail area (remember the largest sail package we could have at the time) she tends to heal significantly. While Nico and John were struggling to secure the large flapping sail coming down onto the deck they kept yelling for me to turn further down wind to keep the boat from healing so much. This becomes a challenge for the helmsman because to do that he needs helm relief because the boat is wanting to go in the opposite direction and is fighting the helm like a spoiled child making a fuss for not getting his way. I was finally able to turn down wind, east of south, not the direction to Hawaii which is significantly west of south. Nico came back to the cockpit and looked over the situation and suggested strongly that we should immediately take down the spinnaker and put the jip top back up, he received no arguments from the crew. Again Nico review the same plan as the night before for this particular head sail change but I couldn’t do the squirrel job because I was at the helm. In the meantime, unbeknown to us, Kent was woken by the flogging of the sails and listing of the boat so he thought it would be a good opportunity to go to the head to relieve himself. So as John ran forward to squirrel the spinnaker he had to go through the head to get to the peak of the boat to pull it into the boat. Unfortunately for Kent he discovered first hand that there isn’t much privacy on a race boat while in the middle of a race; certain things have priority, Mother Nature calling has to take a second fiddle to cumulus clouds exerting their authority! As soon as Nico came back to the cockpit he picked up his story right where he left off as if nothing happened.

Day 4 6:00 A.M. (1755 Miles from Hawaii)

Since I was on watch and Tom was in the bunk I told him that I would handle reporting our positions to the race committee. This is an important task because not doing so can result in a 1 hour time penalty added to your elapsed time and many races are won and lost with less than an hour differential. I reported the position via email and then verified it again during the roll call at 9:30 A.M. One of the boats in the race gets all of the boats positions and then reports the location of every boat with a verification from those boats having a SSB radio and are on frequency. I wrote down every boats position and from what we can tell there is one boat in our fleet that is definitely ahead of us but we are not sure about the others. We will find out at the children’s hour later this afternoon.