Red sky at morning, sailor's take warning....
14 July 2012 | out in the Pacific
and we did.
After 24 hours of running with our long awaited following wind and seas, that were growing to uncomfortable strengths and size, we took the advice of Lin and Larry Pardey from their book Storm Tactics and took a break by putting out our sea anchor to wait until conditions improve to continue on.
The sea anchor is an 18 foot parachute made specifically for this purpose by Para-Tech. We've actually used it twice before, but this was the first time we had to deploy it with just the two of us on board. It was a difficult decision to make as we were making good progress and only had 137 miles to go to our destination. But conditions were worsening and we felt that it was dangerous to continue on as waves were beginning to crash into us and our trusty copilot Rick was having a hard time maintaining the tight course needed to not get sideways to the seas. We planned it out during the night and just waited for daylight to perform the task, and the bright red sky of the sunrise told us we had made the right decision.
Terry carefully inspected and prepared all the gear and then threw the sea anchor with two buoys attached over the side and put out 350 feet of 1" nylon line followed by 100 feet of chain with our sentinal attached (a heavy weight we use with our anchor) to hold the line down in the sea. We then drifted back on it and voila, we are anchored at sea.
Due to the nature of the seas and swell, it is not as comfortable a ride as we had experience before with it, but we are happy to be out of any danger and able to rest and clean up the mess that Cetus has become in the last 48 hours. The forecast is for the wind and seas to gradually diminish over the next 2 days, so we'll have to wait and see what the conditions are like before we tackle the task of retrieving the parachute and getting under way again. The past two days our forecast has called for 18-25 knot winds, when in fact they were 25 to 35 with gusts as high as 47. We are still having winds in the 30's. And just as in the Sea of Cortez, it's not the wind speed that is the problem, it's what the seas become after a sustained period of high winds.
So that's our story for today. This short little passage from the Gambiers to Moorea has turned out to be the most difficult passage we've ever had.