Been feeling rather unwell all day. I’ve slept pretty much most of the day apart from my shifts.
Me and Steve fixed the uncomfortable back rest at the helm seat with some pillows and cable ties.
No fish.
I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t think…..just want to rest again.
Hopefully I’ll feel better in 5 hours for my morning shift.
Woke up early today about 01:30, The morning shift was a bit of a pain, we now have the wind coming from behind/to the side of us, this means our semi protected cockpit does nothing now…. 15-19 knot winds blow straight on to whoever is sitting up there. I’m starting to get a bit chilly up there, might even break out the jumper and jeans at some point.
Winds were swinging around from 90-120 which mean that if it goes above 110 the sails stop acting like wings and start acting like parachutes. To get the best out of the winds and for the safety of the boat, when the winds are coming more from behind you have to change the sail setup, which takes time, but as I said, this morning the winds were swinging all over the place. So this morning I must have change the setup 10+ times, but as I finish changing the setup the winds had gone back and i would have to change to the other setting. In the end I settled for a balance of the 2 settings, it didn’t seem to effect our speed much.
After my morning nap, I’m not feeling that great, feels like the start of a cold, sore throat and little sniffily.
Bit of a nothing day….
Caught 4 fish, 1 was let go, 3 got away (2 of which got away while letting the 1st fish go)
Mum’s been complaining about the roughish ride we’ve been having and said that it always gets rougher when I take the helm. I’m just doing what I’ve been told to do, stay on course and trim the sails. It’s not my fault that during my watch the winds pick up, so do the seas/waves and that I manage to get 8-9 knots of speed out of 15-18 knots of wind.
We are covering a great number of miles now per day, but we are all starting to feel the rough bashing we’ve had over the past few days, you definitely have to hold on to something at all times if you are in a upright position now.
Trying to draw or do photos is a big no no in these conditions. 5+ mins of looking at something other than the sea or horizon will make you feel pretty sick soon enough.
I’m going to cheat a little and start writing these before I go to bed, I know that there’s technically 4 more hours to go until the end of the day, but if anything amazing happens I will just do a extra one or bolt it on to the next days entry.
The 02:00 shift was fine, still bumpy and crashing into the waves, but we were making good progress.
A couple of milestones firstly that about midday we had been sailing for 100 hours, the chart plotter has stopped recording the Trip Hours as it only goes up to 99.59. It has been reading –.– since.
Secondly also during my shift we have now less than 2400 nm to go. Steve said that if we keep this speed up we might be there in 14 days from now, which would be nice, but our chances are slim.
Thirdly, we made (hopefully) our final turn for a couple of thousand miles. We are now on a bearing of 251 degrees straight to Fatu Hiva. It’s now a game of how close we can stay to the course and constantly trimming the sails to get the best out of the wind to keep our speed up.
We caught 3 fish, a little Mahi Mahi, which we tried to use as live bait. It fought for it’s life and broke free of the hook after we dropped him back in to the water. 2 others also got away, one that just jumped off the hook and the other broke the hook, as it was very badly corroded.
We have upgraded some of the lures with new hooks and setup a squiddy with multiple hooks. We’ll see how they get on tomorrow.
In the afternoon a pod of Short Finned Pilot whales came to say hello and were with us for quite some time. Tried to get some photos, I haven’t had a chance to check them out yet, I think I got a few good ones.
Right I’m done for the day. Nighty night.
Woke up at 01:20 to the boat crashing and bashing its way through the waves, it was mum’s shift and I hadn’t been woken to put the Code Zero away so it was still up. The plan was to bring it down as soon as the winds hit 16 knots.
01:30 I was getting myself ready to just check on the situation when Mum cried out for help. The sail had gone, totally ripped from top to bottom and was flapping about past our starboard hull. Steve and mum got into their harnesses and went forward to bring what was left in, while I was at the helm controlling the lines. The seas were quite choppy which didn’t help the situation, but we brought it in with everyone still safe aboard. It was 10 minutes until my shift, I let mum off early to go to bed. Steve and I put up the much stronger normal sails, setup them up and checked everything was fine before Steve also went back to sleep.
RIP: Code Zero, Late 2008 – 2009 Broken …. fixed Early 2010 – Destroyed April 2010
With the normal sails up we have been doing about 6-9 knots, sometimes more. The ocean is no longer a nice long deep swell, with the winds comes the chop and we have been crashing and bashing our way through since just before the Incident, but covering a lot of miles. This is more like what I thought sailing would be like when I signed up for this.
Daily we are finding more and more flying fish and squid about the boat sometimes in very weird places. Steve’s been keeping count, but I’ve forgotten because…….
………We finally broke our bad run on the fishing and bagged ourselves a small Mahi Mahi late afternoon. It has raised Steve and my hopes for the rest of our trip, will this be the start of a freezer packed full of fish.
A pod of 15-20 dolphins came to play with us at sunset, this was nice as we haven’t seen that many dolphins this near to the boat for a while now.
Oh we also had a great lunch of fried egg sandwiches, something I’ve been craving for and to top it off pizza for dinner…… yum yum.
Woke up for my 2-5 am shift with the news Steve had been attacked by a suicidal flying fish. We have developed a small diesel leak and Steve had opened their bedroom window to get some ventilation, during the night a flying fish went straight through the top window on to Steve.
After a later deck inspection Steve found another flying fish and a few squid equally eager to commit suicide.
Winds picked up and shifted in our favor during my morning watch and by the time I had woken up later in the morning, the Code Zero was out and we were making good progress.
As we’re making such good time we are leaving the Code Zero up over night.
No fish on our lines, but as we hauled the lines in after dinner something had taken a couple of serious chunks out of one of our fancy rubber fish lures.
They’re out there just need to hook them or leave the windows open and use Steve as bait.