Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

We all welcomed day 21 with hope and optimism. Steve confirmed that we should see land by tomorrow morning and make land fall by tomorrow sunset. Tomorrow! What a wonderful word. Today would have been a better word but tomorrow is good enough. All we had to do was average three and half knots for the rest of the trip. Easy peasy. Yeah. Don’t forget we’re in the twilight zone.
In the morning we were doing three and half knots. In the afternoon we were doing two and half knots. In the evening the wind died and stayed dead. During my night watch we were doing one and half knots. The nearer we got to land, the slower the boat got. Would we ever reach land? At the end of my night watch it was 0.8 knots. The ETA showed 74 hours. Thats another three more days. Wasn’t it three days ago that the ETA was three days. Noooooooo!

72nm to go.

How our fortunes and hopes rise and fall. Having had a small boost the day before, day 22 turned out to be a let down. The winds dropped to around 6-10 knots from right behind us. Our daytime average ended up under 4 knots and over night just over 3. I always expected to motor a little today to achieve landfall before dusk but after the last 24 hours poor progress we’ll need to apply a slight push to get us up to 5 knots all day. My guess this will add up to around 4-5 hours of genset time which is more fuel than I really wanted to burn to essentially give us a night at anchor rather than on the move. I went to sleep knowing I may have to make a decision to simply sail on and save the fuel or do the assist and assure ourselves of the anchorage. Well, the decision presented itself. I found myself in favour of sailing but figured I’d be very unpopular with the crew. And you never know, the wind may pick up later today. So we’re now making 5 knots with a push from the batteries. If I can, I’ll perform some of the recharging in conjunction with my planned house battery reset/recondition so it won’t be so bad.

One of the problems with the low winds is controlling the boom. The swell often gets the better of the sail which has little pressure to hold it in place resulting in slams or the occasional accidental jibe. I tried experimenting with different placings for a preventer, ie a line tied from the boom down to one of the cleats. In the end I found the most effective solution was two lines, one from the center of the boom down to the center cleat and one from the end of the boom to the stern cleat such that the stern line takes the pressure just after the center line.

There was some evidence that we are closer to land as we’ve seen a few more sea birds than normal. For the last three weeks we’ve seen just the occasional solitary bird. Today we saw a few flocks of white birds as well as what I believe was a tern in the distance.

I realized I made an error in my calculations as to what distance we could first see Fatu Hiva. Not in the trig but in converting the height of the highest peak into nautical miles. The corrected distance is now 68nm. That means it will be potentially visible at dawn.