Fourth day and night at sea.
It is so nice to be heading in the right direction. The winds and seas are just right and we’re bombing along at 7-8 knots in a straight line to Fiji.
I discovered some further damage to the boat. One of the pulleys on our traveller through which the mainsheet passes had disintegrated. No sign of it at all. The load from the boom was now down on one pulley and the normal 4:1 tension ratio was down to 2:1. This discovery began a series of moves to put in permanent preventers on the boom and then to redo the lines on the traveller so that we’d be back to 3:1 on the pulleys and less load on the remaining traveller pulley. All while continuing to sail.
At the end of that effort we struck what must have been a huge fish. The excitement didn’t last long as the line snapped when I put the brake on to avoid losing the line.
I also put out a few emails to arrange replacement battens and sail cars. The former has quite progressed with a number of our friends prepared to bring some spares up to Fiji and the sail maker ready to hand some over.
Morale aboard is pretty high now that we’re heading in the right direction at a decent speed. ETA is currently during the night of May 7th. The forecast looks pretty good all the way up until the last day when we run into some sort of front. Oh well.
We are feeling the benefits of heading north. While we haven’t had our warmest day since Tuesday, our night time temperatures have been rising. The last 24 hours have been more or less flat at 20C. The sea temperature is up from 18C to 24C. I hope soon we’ll be able to go to tee-shirts.
With four of us aboard we’ve been running a 2 hour on, 6 hour off shift system. It’s working very well. Sam’s on at 1am, then Paul at 3am, then Helen at 5am, then me at 7am. The whole pattern repeats twice more throughout the day.
Helen got to choose her slot first (being Admiral) and is perhaps least happy with her rotation. But all is good when you can get 5-6 hours of solid sleep in a go. Particulary with a couple of extra 3-4 hour sleeps thrown in too.
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