Nothing like a cold redbull to wash down a delicious Italian meal before hopping on the dogwatch...ha.ha.ha. I cooked dinner tonight, which turned into Cameron and me cooking dinner (as I hoped it would). We made a delicious Spaghetti meal with a homemade sausage and prosciutto sauce and lots of mozzarella cheese. In my completely unbiased opinion I think the American team meals have been the best so far. Not to say that we haven´t had some other good feeds as well, but there have been some bad ones.
We are finally back in the breeze which has been great for the most part. We are averaging around 10 kts of boat speed which is awesome, and in just our last 3 watches we have done 128 miles! We have about 1200 miles as the crow flies left between us and Cowes which at this speed of about 200 miles a day would take 6 days. That´s IF we were to go in a straight line averaging 10 kts of boat speed. So realistically that´s not going to happen without quite a bit of good fortune.
Now as I said, being back in the breeze has been good for the most part. Yesterday I said to Cameron how it seems like we haven´t done much lately and that our watch seems to avoid the big sail changes. That evening Cameron blogged about how we play "the needle game" when we drive. Basically you have to keep the needle of the compass within a 20 degree window with a little bit of leeway on either side. He went so far as to explain how with waves and gusts you can get knocked about and some times you round up or down 30 degrees or so. Now he went even farther with his description and talked about how if you round up while flying a spinnaker at night in 15-20 kts of breeze you risk waking up the owner and the whole crew, tacking the boat under full sail and potentially doing some serious damage to the boat. He wrote this blog at about midnight, as we are sailing in 15-20 kts of breeze with the spinnaker up. at 1 am we turned over the helm to the next watch as the breeze picked up a little bit and we went below. 10 minutes later Cameron is settled in on the couch in the salon, I´m just about to get in bed and we feel the boat round up and hear the sails flapping heavily. We hold our breath for a minute, the sails stop luffing so we figure they saved it and came back down. Nope. EVERYBODY ON DECK NOW! They managed to do the impossible and tack with the spinnaker, mainsail (thankfully with 2 reefs already in), mizzen stay sail, and mizzen sail all up. We all threw on gear, and life jackets, and sprinted onto the deck. Somehow everyone went right to work, Cameron and I did what we knew how to do best and that was head right for the foredeck and try to get the spinnaker down. Alex and some of the Germans went to work easing the main around. We sail with a preventer on the boom at all times which is a line run from the end of the boom to a winch on the bow to ensure that it doesn´t come flying across the deck. so moving the main around is a bit of a process. Bear in mind that the boom weighs somewhere in the range of 500 lbs. Cameron and I were on the foredeck with Franco, one of the Argentines. The clew of the spinnaker had released and since we had tacked the spinnaker was inside the forestay. With I think only about 5 words spoken between Franco and me, I was able to explain to him how I wanted to get the spinnaker down without screwing anything up any more. It basically entailed the two of us wordlessly lowering the pole, this involves lowering the toping lift and taking up on the downhaul because you don´t do one without the other when the spinnaker pole is a good sized tree trunk. I then went up to the very bow where I was able to just grab the foot and the two of us, with Cameron on the halyard were able to get it down with only two small holes and no serious damage.
It´s times like this when I am really glad that I am not on "one of those plastic things" as our owner likes to refer to them. On any other boat having 4 sails backwinded in 25 kts of breeze would have likely brought the rig down. I didn´t realize it until Cameron mentioned it afterwards, but when we came on deck the boat was actually moving backwards, and at a pretty good clip too. Thankfully this didn´t happen in our first couple days out here because by this time everyone was able to fall into their natural positions with only a little bit of miscommunication. Everyone came out of it ok, other than being a little shaken up. After a few hours of sleep, I was dragged back out of bed at 5:30 to set the spinnaker again so we could get back up on the horse. "We are in a regatta you know" yes, thanks Hans. We know.
Other than that, and a slightly stressful douse this evening as the wind picked up everything is running smoothly and we are making good speed. We are expecting this breeze to hold through tomorrow at which point we are waiting for our mysterious weather guru to tell us where to go so we can be positioned well for the next big low pressure system coming through.
Few other side notes: We saw the sun for the 1st time in a few days today and I was able to do a little laundry in 5 gallon buckets on the back of the boat which was good. We saw a pod of about 10 porpoises/pilot whales the other day when we had no wind which was pretty freaking awesome. they came right up next to the boat. We also had only our 2nd spectacular sunset of the trip a few days ago which was also pretty cool. Finally we are hoping that it has been confirmed that we are not a terrorist threat because 2 days ago a plane circled around us a few times at what must have been an altitude of about 100 feet. It said "ICT Reconnaissance" on the side and we figured that they were out looking for ice chunks still floating south. turns out that ICT is the International Institute for Counter Terrorism...who knew.
Thats all for now, hoping to be in Cowes next week sometime.
Sailing fast and hoping for fair winds,
-Andrew
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