Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

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.

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.

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.

For the last 24 hours we’ve been experiencing the winds Dignity thrives in. The winds have settled into a range between 15 and 20 knots. We have as much power as we want as we can regenerate for as long as we need and we’ve managed to put in over 160nm as the crow flies. The boat as traveled a little further through the water as a result of the differing levels of crew attention to the direction we’re traveling. I haven’t been taking snapshots of the log so I’ll need to download our track and calculate actual distance traveled in 24 hours. I’ll try that in a few days. If we maintain these speeds we’ll arrive around May 2nd.

Deck count yesterday comprised 5 flying fish and 9 squid. We’re beginning to realize just how hard we need to look for these dead critters as I managed to find a squid on top of the cabin roof tucked out of sight underneath a line cover.

My spirits were certainly higher yesterday compared to the previous 24 hours. Getting out of the low winds was partly responsible. Catching a mahi mahi helped too despite it being a small 6lb one (weighed after bleeding).

I’ve progressed ordering a replacement light air sail and am just awaiting responses from agents in Tahiti.

Already the days are merging, one into another. The wind decreased in the morning so we put out the code zero sail. I finished the Time Travelers Wife which left me a little sad. The wind picked up again in the afternoon. We were making such good progress that Steve decided to leave the code zero up at sunset. I wasn’t too keen as the last time we had it up at night, the wind increased and tore our code zero while on my shift. Bringing down the code zero at night is also difficult. All three of us has to be up to do it easily which means waking two people up from their much needed sleep. However the wind seemed consistent and the thought of making good progress throughout the night finally swung us.

When I took over from Steve at 11pm the wind was a little stronger but still within the safe strength for our code zero. We were making excellent progress and regenerating too. I kept an close eye on the the wind for a couple of hours and all was fine. Then I began to notice these occasional gusts were the wind really picked up. Quickly it would go back to normal strength and I would relax. However these gusts began to come more often and I began dithering. Should I fall off and release the pressure on the sail just in case these gust should continue increasing. This would mean going off our track and heading more west than our preferred south heading. Or should I wake up the boys and bring down the code zero. We could then put up the main and head sails and continue with our preferred heading. I dithered too long. There was a sudden bang the code zero tore from top to bottom!