avionbianca   Blog for s/v Avion

7:30pm, Sun July 20

Last few nights the sky has been incredible as I’ve come on watch at 11pm. This morning we had a wrap around sunrise, 360 degrees of pink clouds. We kept the watch schedule on PDT, so as we’ve gone west through 2 or 3 time zones, when the sun rises and sets changes a bit each day. Sunrise is about 10amm boat time. We put the fishing line in the water 2 days ago, yesterday we got a hit, got away before we landed it, beautiful dorado, or mahimahi. Today we got anotheer hit, and landed another dorado. They are iridescent blue and green for about 2 minutes, then fade fast to yellow, heartbreaking beautiful as they slash through the blue water. We ate more than half of it as sashimi, the rest will get cooked for dinner. While I was cleaning the fish another one hit, but got away before I could land it. Hard to believe that we’ll be ashore sometime Tuesday.

12:30pm, Fri July 18

A few notables: coming on deck at about 11pm to a fairly clear sky, no moon yet, and breath taking stars. The milky way is hard to describe at sea. Nico saw a shooting star that broke into 2 pieces, I missed that one.

Lightning under clouds a few miles off last night, that was attention grabbing. The discussion on the roll call on the radio this morning was that the thing to do is put handheld satphone, GPS and VHFs in the oven, the metal box will likely protect them from induced currents in case of a strike. Nothing close to any boats.

There is a boat that retired due to a broken rudder, they are under way with either a spare rudder or steering with a drogue, not sure at this point.

Another boat retired to run under engine, they have to make a work schedule. Their location at radio check in put them in a wind hole we have been angling to avoid, based on the grib file wind forecasts we are watching. The grib files are downloaded directly from NOAA, and are generated by the same computer simulations that they use to do all the TV weather forecasting you see. We can specify which computer model we want, what time sequence, and what area on the earth. It’s pretty cool. They show up as an email attachment that we get via the satellite internet link. We can zoom in on where we expect or want to be in 1,2,3,4 days, all animated.

We’re angling tto stay a bit north of a wind hole south of us, that will dissipate about the time we turn south, should keep winds above 10 knots, in the middle of the hole theres 5 knots to nothing. Right now we have 15.1 knots true. We’re running under our #2 symmetric spinnaker, our biggest one.

We had a spinnaker pole end fail a few days ago, but we were able to fix it well enough, we are using that one upside down, and we have 2 poles. Two poles makes gybing the spinnaker a lot easier, especially in high winds and waves. We haven’t had much of that yet, but may as we approach Hawaii.

Angie will be glad to know the fishing line is set, pretty lure and a flying fish that landed on deck last night. We’re out of the precooked food, first freeze-dried meal last night, which was good. I had another bucket bath just a bit ago. And its a glorious sunny day. Time to go to bed 🙂

12:30pm, Mon July 14

I made a tasty batch of oatmeal this morning, dried mangoes craisins apricots and a banana. It was even better with peanut butter mixed in.

Angie would agree that Avion has a lot of strings for a boat her size. All led to the cockpit, except for some of the spinnaker pole controls. So that, combined with a mainsheet traveler that goes across the rather small cockpit, makes playing twister as we shift the 3 crew on deck complicated. 3 of the lines are continuous loops, so they have to be contended with specially. Not to mention everyone has a dual tether, so we are clipped in at all times. It can get complicated. In the middle of this the tiller has to get handed off cleanly. Last night as we were playing the game, while Nico steered, Juan was wrestling the boom vang loop, his tether, where to put his feet, and keep his balance, I got the bright idea of “helping” him with the boom vang line. He was quite twisted up in all of it before he started to get upset, and only then realized I was “helping”. We had a good laugh, and later Nico told some of his Club Med prank stories. He taught sailing there in the Bahamas, and they seem to know how to have fun there. At least he does.

We just dropped and reraised the A3 spinnaker, paused to check for chafe on its halyard at the masthead sheave. Keeping track of and stopping these kind of issues is key. We’ve rejiggered how a few things are run to minimize stress, chafe and wear of the lines and fittings. The spinnaker guy is run inside the lifelines right now, as we have the pole so far forward for reaching on the A3. This is why some boats are set up with a reaching strut at the bow.

To bed for 3 hours of shut eye.

12:20pm, Sun July 13

We just dropped down to the A3 (smaller asymetric spinnaker) as we have more consistent wind and need to carry it higher as we are changing to be heading more west, about 230M. Expect about 15 knots most of today. We seem to be out of the low wind for now. The weather files are predicting what we are seeing, so that is great. Today we spotted and hailed Coyote, just a bit behind us, they are in our division. Great to see and hear others out here.

Yesterday we turned a corner, in that we had sunny skies, a real sunset, and yet warmer conditions. I took a bath, which was great. We had a great celebration for Nico’s birthday last evening as well. It was great to have us all on deck together and enjoying being together on this adventure through time and space. We had a real sunrise today, and its now warm enough below deck that I am going to have to switch to shorts and short sleeves. At night it is only a shirt and foulie jacket for me, sandals, no more boots.

Soon after sunset last night the full moon started to rise out of the ocean, we had bright moonlight all night, still in the sky at dawn today. Nico saw a few birthday shooting stars as well.

The engine is running great, holding its oil now, charging the batteries at 48 amps right now. We do about 2 hours a day of charging. Dinner last night was mongolian beef stew. The broccoli casserole just came out of the freezer to thaw for tonight. For the first part of the trip we have preprepared dinners that are frozen on dry ice in a cooler. After that its freeze dried dinners, which will be good too. Kent did most of the dinners, some are from Tom’s favorite grocery catering service, Nico drove the gathering for the freeze dried end of the food. Water and fuel are plentiful, the boat is sailing great, and we are all having a great time.

9:03am, Fri July 11

We’ve been getting more wind, 10 knots right now, but teens up to low 20’s off and on. We’ve been flying the largest asymmetric spinnaker (A1.5) some, jib topper otherwise, #1 jib on deck but not getting used the last few days. We had one episode last night where we had 7 knots, put the asym up, and had 18 knots right away, too much to carry that sail on the angle we had for the course we wanted, that was a little exciting, but no big deal. We had it up and down in about 10 minutes of concerted effort, good for a laugh. Had a reef in the main a good part of yesterday, boatspeed up to 8+ knots at times. It was fun to have moved up to 3rd place in our division at the 5pm ssb radio hour. 2nd today? Still overcast, brief glimpses of sun and moon, clouds more formed today, so there is a change. Notably warmer air temps, and the water color has changed to deeper shade of blue. all boat systems working, we had about 2.5 amps of solar charging in the overcast, will have more when we break into the clear. Running the engine twice a day for about an hour. We’re doing 4 hours on 4 hours off watches, with 3 teams of 2 each, with staggered changes, its working well. We’re doing about an hour at a time driving, so that keeps us fresh and awake.

5:15pm, Wed July 9

We’re moving along well, though with light winds so far, often below 5 knots. We started with #3 headsail and a reef in the main, went to #1 and no reef about the timme we hit Point Bonita ouutside the gate, then moved to the jib topper later on. This is a larger headsail than the #1, cut high and sheeted further back.

Right this second we are listening to the “the children’s hour” on the ssb. Its the chance for people in the race to chat about most anything, ask for help, get current position in the race, etc. We’re currently 4th place in our division of 6. We had 9 boats in sight quite a bit of the night and this morning, pretty tightly bunched.

Other notables were 8-10 whales in about 15 minutes, one of which surfaced about 10 yards in front of the boat, rest were quite close, 100 yards or so. Large quantaties of floating jellyfish, portugese man of war looking from above, very pretty. I caught one by its sail, no long tentacles, so not a PMOW.

Its gotten a bit warmer and dryer, had been a bit foggy. All is well, we are getting good rest and food, looking forward to more wind as in the forecsast soon. The light winds were expected, we’ve concentraated on getting west to get to the offshore winds.

It will not be a short race for us, the boats that started first had better conditions than we will get, most likely. No concern, but it won’t be fast it seems, at this point.