A lot has happened since my last post.
First, we destroyed our medium-weight spinnaker. Now, "we destroyed" is
probably not an entirely fair use of the active voice. I don't think we did
anything wrong this time.* It's just one of those things that happens when
you push a sail to its limits. Overall, I think we still have a much better
record on sail damage than most boats. Anyway, about 3m below the head,
there's a horizontal tear in from the luff. Partway along, it T's off
downward, and a massive tear runs all the way to the clew. It's bad, but
we're working on repairing it. Matt said it's not the worst tear he's ever
had to repair at sea, but he said it in that way that makes me suspect he's
possibly not being entirely honest in the interest of keeping us motivated.
We'll see how it goes. Even with that, his estimate is five days of round-
the-clock work to get it fixed.
* I did spend most of my time in Qingdao re-doing or reinforcing old
repairs to this sail. And I did say that if these repairs didn't hold, we
should just fly the thing until it exploded. I did say "if", and my repairs
did hold, so I refuse to take the blame for a jinx.
We have also had a lot of sail changes. This highlight was a drop of the
Yankee 1 (the biggest headsail) when it was gusting to 50. The thing is, as
the wind changes, it's much easier to adjust your main (reef in and out)
than change a headsail. So, if you think the wind is going to peak at a
speed where your current headsail is OK, you keep it up and reef. Then,
when the wind dies down, you can shake out reefs, and you would have saved
a lot of effort and maintained a lot of boat speed. But if the wind builds
more than you expect, you can end up with a really tough takedown. Matt is
generally pretty conservative this way, but this time the wind got away a
bit. He might be pushing a bit harder with the better crew we have now. The
last really big Yankee 1 drop I can remember was back in Leg 4. The last
leg, we went to smaller sails pretty quickly. And we have the crew to
handle it safely. It's just a lot of work.
That said, I report on most of this second-hand, because I was laid out
with a stomach bug. Two days ago, I started the 2-6am watch on the helm.
About 45 minutes in, I felt a bit faint, called Tom to take over, and sat
down. Within a couple of minutes, I felt better, but by the end of watch,
my stomach was cramping up. I'll spare you the details, but I blame the
day-old prawn curry I had supplemented my lunch with the day before. I
slept for almost 30 hours straight, which blew my track record of having
shown up to every watch, which was pretty disappointing. But I'm feeling
much improved now, and I've been up for the last two watches. I'm not 100%
strength, but I did take two trips up to the bow for sail changes before
declining a third to take a cockpit job instead.
One final note. It looks like we're currently at almost the exact latitude
of Channel Islands Harbor. Hi Mom and Dad!. For the wider audience, that's
just north of LA. Point being, I shouldn't be getting too comfortable with
the thoroughly bearable temperatures we've had so far. It's a long way
north to Seattle. It's also a long way east. When I zoom all the way out on
our nav computer, it still won't show both our position and Seattle on the
screen. Of course, 4050 nm to go sums it up pretty neatly as well.
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