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Helen: Day 5

by helen, on April 17th, 2010 (At Sea)

Wind, wind lots of wind. Its amazing how obsess we get about wind once we’re under way. We have perfect wind speed for our boat at the moment, late teens to twenty knots. On my shift I was making about 8 knots an hour. Waves are still a bit choppy but we’ve turned west slightly away from the wind and waves so the ride is more pleasant.

In the afternoon we caught a small mahi mahi. It wasn’t worth keeping so Steve decided to use it as bait. We didn’t attract any more fish but we did attract a large pod of Short-finned Pilot Whales. There must have been about fifteen of them. They chased and swam by our boat for about thirty minutes. They weren’t too big, on average about fourteen to sixteen feet long. We saw a mother and baby. The baby was about six feet long. They swam like dolphins and had a white making on their back. We all felt quite high after their visit. It really was an amazing sight.

Category: At Sea | Here is my comment

Steve: Day 5

by KC2RIY, on April 17th, 2010 (At Sea)

Day 5 was by far the best day of the passage so far for a number of reasons. In no particular order :

* I had a decent sleep without being woken by a shredded sail or a wet fish in the bed

* We hooked three mahi mahi. The first escaped. The second was rather small so we used it as bait but it either escaped the hook or was eaten off. The third mahi escaped the triple hook by breaking two of the hooks off. All fun.

* We made our turn to the Marquesas. It was only about 20 degrees but now we’re no longer purposely going further south than the straight line would suggest. We feel we have good seas and winds and it’s time to run on in. Just another 2,400nm to go.

* The absolute highlight was being accompanied by a pod of 15-20 short finned pilot whales for about 30 minutes. We saw at least two babies amongst the group who were easily keeping up with our 8-9 knots of boat speed at the time. At times we would see four or five of the whales surfing down a wave. When the whales were close to the side of the boat they were easily seen beneath the clear water as well as being very obvious when they came up for air. On a couple of occasions a more energetic whale would almost clear the water. The larger whales were about half the length of the boat. It really felt like we were the visitors in their domain as they appeared to be simply having fun alongside us.

* Last but not least I have finally had motions of some consistency since we left Ayora a week ago. Not really blog material but after a week of the alternative the occasion left me feeling pretty pleased.

I heard from our friends Richard and Kristie aboard Lileth that both their autopilots have failed and they still have a 1,000nm to hand steer to the Marquesas. We wish them good luck. They’ll surely kiss the soil when they arrive.

In the end I spoiled my day a little by dropping a winch handle overboard. We have another big one and a couple of crappy backups but I’d rather not have lost the first and best one. Will have to make sure we don’t lose the next one before Tahiti.

Category: At Sea | Here is my comment

John: Day 5

by john, on April 17th, 2010 (At Sea)

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.

Category: At Sea | Here is my comment

Helen: Day 4

by helen, on April 16th, 2010 (At Sea)

I woke up feeling terrible about our torn code zero sail. Although we’ve had it up in stronger winds before there must have been a weakness in the sail from the last tear. But still, if I had made up my mind sooner and been more decisive, we could have saved the sail. Consolation was that we had lots of wind this morning, way up in the high teens. We were flying at seven to eight knots and regenerating too. I felt exhilarated sitting up at the helm, feeling the boat soar through the water and watching the white crested waves all around us. I also felt sooth and comforted.

There is a downside to lots of wind and that is lots of choppy waves. If we were sailing down wind, the boat would flow with the wind and waves and hence provide an smoother motion and be easier on the boat. However we are still trying to head south and so are sailing almost up wind or to the beam (side). This means we are crushing into the choppy waves or have waves bashing onto the side of our hull. The banging and slapping noise of the waves fills the inside cabins and is pretty horrible. Everything creaks, squeaks and shakes and you wonder if the whole boat is going to fall apart.

Unlike a mono hull, catamarans do not heal over on to its side. This means that most things stay upright on a catamaran. I rarely put things away when we’re on the move and we often have tall cups, bowls and even bottles out on the tables while we’re sailing. This is great but the erratic side to side rocking motion of the cat does take getting use to. Naturally as the wind and the waves increases this erratic motion also increases and can become quite uncomfortable. I know I’m complaining. I wanted wind and I got it. I just forgot about the choppy waves.

In the late afternoon we caught our first fish of the trip. A nice medium size mahi mahi. We decided it was the classical music we were blaring out that attracted the fish. At sunset dozens of dolphins came out to play. Watching dolphins dance to Mozart was pretty cool. My night shift was plain sailing.

Category: At Sea | Here is my comment

John: Day 4

by john, on April 16th, 2010 (At Sea)

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.

Category: At Sea | Here is my comment
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