12/18/2009, 227 nautical miles East of Barbados
Hookahey: a good day for dying! Today it was hot. In the morning I woke up at 6h for my early morning shift. It was dark, the sun rises between 9h and 10h, because we are still on UTC. Through the night there was not much wind and I slept with the cabin hatch wide open. No risk of rain or ocean water coming over the bow. My cabin is in the bow: a nice place, although Ulric doesn't agree with me: in the bow the boat's motions are sensed much stronger than in the starboard/port side cabins, where Peter sleeps, and than sensed in the aft cabin: traditionally the skipper's cabin. And it's true: sometimes it is like sleeping in a rollercoaster. But not last night.
Yesterday there was not much wind also: Ulric and I more or less decided that we should hoist the spi (spinnaker/balloon foresail) today if the wind didn't increase. I never sailed with a spi before. Ulric has, but not with much success: his spi is new because he broke the previous one when he tried to fly with it. Peter has sailed on a boat with a spi (Queen's Ransom II) some four years ago. None of us has much experience spi-flying is only possible with low wind and bares a great danger of gear-damage. Rewarding is the few extra knots and the increased boat stability: the spi pulls the bow out of the water and prevents the boat from strong rolling.
To hoist the spi we had to remove some of the gear: the genoa had to be furled in, the stay-sail taken away, and the inner stay (where the stay-sail is mounted) had to be removed. Ulric read the procedure in a Sailing Manual so that we would not make mistakes when hoisting the spi. It took us 1 1/2 hour to manage to hoist the spi: connecting starboard and port sheet to the clews of the spi, remove stay-sail and inner stay, furl in genoa, mount the boom for the spi, hoisting the sock and removing the sock so that the spi could unfold itself. Then we spent half an hour to trim the boat. But Ulric wasn't sure if the spi would hold: due to the waves the boat moved too much. Even with low wind the ocean waves are pretty high. The spi caught wind from the wrong side from time to time, whichis dangerous: the fabric of the spi is very light, similar to parachute silk. It can rupture very easily. With his last experience of destroying a spi Ulric didn't want to take the risk again: after one hour trying tostabilise the sail we took it down again. Today it was too hot to handle the spinnaker.
An exciting experience, though! Flying with the wind.
We sailed into the region north of Surinam, a former Dutch colony. We traded it in the past for the island of Manhattan with the British. Manhattan became (as a part of the US) independent 200 years earlier than Surinam, which is an independent country since 1975. Capital is Paramaribo ("Parbo"). Its size of 130 000 squared kilometers (rough guess) is about 4 times that of the Netherlands. There live perhaps 300 000 - 400 000 inhabitants. After a long time of dictatorship under Desi Boutersethings have become more normal in the last decade. At least four of the Dutch crews we met in the Cape Verdes aimed at Surinam as an intermediate stop for the Caribbean. We are about 400 NM of Surinam's (North) Coast sailing almost straight westwards to Barbados, island of palmtrees, white beaches and rhum-cocktails. And flying fish sandwiches! I knew you could eat flying fish but have read on the internet that they didn't taste very well. Apparently this must be a myth because it is the typical Bajan snack.
Today is maybe the hottest day of the trip. Temperature in the cabins is 33 - 34 centigrade, in the cockpit it is about 29 centigrade. Yesterday Ulric mounted a deck "shower". The garden hose with sprayhead that we use e.g. to clean the ship has been attached to the forestay. With salt water shampoo we take a fresh seawater shower on the foredeck. The sea water temperature is "only" 26.5 centigrade. This gives us some relief. For the rest we don't do much. The lunch washing up stays untouched from noon until 17h: today is too hot to handle anything! I sit on the swim-platform on the stern, just a few centimeters above the sea. Here is shadow. The stern faces East, the sun has crossed the meridian and is on the West. The ocean's colour has changed from deep blue into a greenish blue. Apparently we sail in a region with more/different algae.
At sunset we set the inner stay and stay-sail again, just before dinner: cous cous with dried apricots, feta, dried tomatoes, chicken stock. We drink some beer and wine: San Miguel (spanish lager beer), Guinness (stout). and white wine; some spanish mainland wine. After dinner music of the Waterboys with coffee and dark chocolate: 85 % cocoa; in this temperature even this chocolate is soft. In the early night we gybe the mainsail to port to maintain an optimal course to Barbados.
Current arrival estimates, based on present speed of 5 knots over ground: 20 Dec 08h UTC. Local Barbados time this is 4h in the morning. I am on my dogwatch when I write this, likely my last dogwatch on QRIII. I hope to spent my next dogwatch in some Bridgetown.
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12/16/2009
Squalls. A few times mentioned in previous blogs. What are they? How do we recognize them? We don't know. From our onboard library we have seen a few pictures. Crispin Latymer, author of "Where the Ocean meets the sky", crossed the Atlantic single-handed. His book shows a beautiful picture of a squall approaching on the cover. Crispin bought Queen's Ransom II, Ulric's previous boat, sometime after he did his crossing. Other literature give more technical details. There seem to be two types of squalls: line squalls and white squalls. The line squall is recognizable by its thin black line at the horizon: the shadow that the cloud and rain shower cast on the ocean. Also on the radar it is readily visible: the rain underneath the clouds reflects the radar signal very strongly. The white squall can appear out of the blue: they are very rare, so rare that some people believe that they are just an urban myth. Although a bit dramatically presented, Watch e.g. the film "White Squall" (withe Jeff Bridges among others) to have an impression of the weather in the heart of a squall.
Squalls are potential danger to gear and crew: the wind under a squall cloud may in a sudden become 2 - 3 times stronger accompanied with a unpredictable change of its direction. Therefore, when we see clouds looking like Crispin's book's cover in principle we reef the sails turn off the autopilot and manually steer QRIII and try to exploit the extra wind as much as possible. Today we had a few of these line squalls overtaking us. They didn't hit us fully, we were always a bit on the edge, keeping out of the danger zone meanwhile surfing on the increased wind: increases of windspeed from 10 knots (4 Beaufort) to 28 knots (7 Beaufort) have been noticed while simultaneously our SOG (speed over ground) increased from 3.5 knots to almost 10 knots! To my experience (I have squall experience after today) they feel pretty similar to mid-summer evening rain/thunder clouds that I know from my time in Dresden: after a warm day almost suddenly clouds appear from which it is strongly raining, and often accompanied with strong winds. Difference: the squalls here appear through the whole day, and, until now, have not showed any sign of thunder and/or lightning.
Tonight (Tuesday December 15th) I have my "dogwatch" from 02h to 06h. The clocks onboard are synchronised to UTC (Universal coordinated time: Zulu time; GMT; Greenwich Mean Time: it's all the same). Because we are geographically in timezone GMT-3 my watch time is equivalent to a 23h - 03h watch in local time. UTC is default in off-shore navigation and communication. And in our case it will give us a sudden 4 hours extra on arrival at Barbados when we switch back our clocks to Barbados local time.
Just after the start of my watch I switch on the radar to see if there is traffic on our way, undetected with our AIS transceiver. On port I see three strong rain showers within 3 miles of our vessel. They are no danger considering our direction and the wind direction. Dark couds behind us worry me more: could they be squalls? I decide to switch on the radar every 15 minutes. It takes 70 seconds to start up the instrument, besides, it uses a lot of board electric power: in particular the submission of a radar signal over a radius of 48 miles (maximum radar range), strong enough to be detected after 96 miles (back and forth to the object) requires a high power.
But as long as we can run the fridge, also an electricity hungry instrument, to keep our beer cool I see no reason to use the radar incidentally. In Dutch inland waters it is mandatory to have the radar switched on if the instrument is mounted and is in an operational state, day and night. Here, at open sea, only a few internationally acknowledged sea laws apply. I don't think having the radar switched on is one of them. In cases of accidents insurance policies may require radar use if a radar is available, however.
The dark cloud closes in rapidly. A strong signal on the radar screen appears: this could be a squall approaching! I start to check and close the hatches so that no rain or sea water can enter the cabins. Then I start to furl in the genoa, not knowing how strong winds we will have to suffer. Meanwhile it has started to rain. The wind speed increases rapidly from 14 to over 25 knots and I wake up the captain. Wind and rain don't get worse as we both monitor the cloud passing by on the radar screen. Then the wind slows down and the rain stops. Everything in the cockpit is wet. Although we are within the tropics, I feel cold. Wet and in the wind on a tropics winter day bare bodied with just short pants is not pleasant. After furling out the genoa followed by a quick deck check to make sure that the boat has not suffered any damage, how little it may be, I go inside to grab a T-shirt and a wind-proof jacket, that once was water-proof also, but not anymore.
An hour later the second squall passes by: again we are just hit by its tail. I have furled in the genoa only half this time and decide not to wake up Ulric. The radar proofs to be a good instrument for early detection of squalls and to make decisions based on its direction relative to the boat. My watch is over at 6h. I wake up Ulric. Before I fall asleep I notice how he furls out the genoa again.
Three hours later I have a shift again: the morning shift from assistant shift 9h - 12h, where I have to do the daily checks on chafes and other defects, loosening nuts and bolts etc., followed by the noon deck shift of 12h - 15h, where I am responsible for the sailing and navigation of the vessel.
When I woke up I found myself in again another squall. In the rain and strong wind QRIII surfed towards Barbados! From Ulric I heard that in the early morning hours the wind was totally absent making our SOG vanish. We should make use of the squalls in daytime to uphold our average as much as possible: the first 7 full sailing days after the Cape Verdes delivered an average of over 175 miles (325 km) per 24 hours. We will loose that average because the wind seems to have dropped to around 10 knots where it used to be 18 - 22 knots. Only the squalls provide us with more wind. They appear with interrupts of about 2 - 3 hours behind us, and we are steering QRIII as optimal as possible in their paths. It helps, every time we manageto increase our velocity with a few knots for half an hour or slightly more. In the afternoon the fun is over: the sun returns, the wind not, also the squalls stay away from our boat. After my deck watch I prepare dinner: red beet/herring salad, the Dutch way. Albeit, without herrings. I use vacuum packed anchovis in a mix of vinegar and oil. Not as salty as the tinned anchovis, still saltier than herrings. Other ingredients: potatoes, egg, red beet, apple, onion, capern, malt vinegar, lemon juice. And a topping of little mayonaise. I serve it with some of the German Vollkorn Brot (Aldi brand prepacked in aluminium), with slices of tomatoes, and onion rings with bell pepper rings fried in olive oil. And two of the anchovis separate, just for the eye. Peter selected a white Galician wine.
As a starter, about one hour before dinner, I prepared some fried frankfurter wrapped in bacon with slices of fried aubergine. With a can of Dorada beer, local beer of the Canary Islands. Ulric and Peter seem to like it. But it is already 21h: Ulric has tomorrow's dogwatch (tomorrow starts for him 02h). Peter has 8 hours to sleep until 6h.
It is 00h now, 2 hours to go then my watch is over. Our position is 500 miles north of Cabo Orange, the most north point at Brazil's main land coastline, at the border with French Guyana. I am left alone in the cockpit playing some music of dEUS, Mano Negra, Einstuerzende Neubauten, ... it is a nice and quiet evening after our day of squall surfing.
When Ulric takes over watch I will have worked today from 02h until 02h, with just some short naps between 06h and 09h and between 16h and 18h. This makes the 22h - 02h early nightshift the toughest nightshift. But I am rewarded with a 7 hours subsequent sleep until 9h in the morning when (in UTC) here the sun is just rising. The sky is clear, the Milky Way is readily visible, the constellations of Orion, Cassiopeia, Cygnus, shine bright. In the western sky Jupiter lights up the clouds a bit: Jupiter is very bright in this dark night. The moon is in its final stage, tonight, after 00h, it is 16 December and it will be new moon. There are only a few clouds at the horizon behind us. That is where the wind comes from, where occasionally squalls come from. The clouds look harmless: I can see the stars between their underneath and the horizon, which means that they don't rain out. With a SOG of 7 knots and a wind of 19 knots the conditions of two days before and longer ago seem to have returned.
I call it a day.
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12/16/2009, 450 miles East of Barbados
I slept very well when Hans woke me for my watch at two o'clock this night. Needed a lot of coffee to stay awake. I am perched with my legs up in a corner of the cockpit with my lap top; which has to be used rather than the PC for emails given our continuing Inmarsat problems. It is a novelty to be in an "outdoors office" rather than my normal base at the navigation desk. I hear how the boat is cutting through the water creating a bow wave and the occasional slamming of the sails. The sounds of water and wind, while my skin is being caressed by the tropical air; not hot, just fresh and nice. More stable conditions have once again returned to our little patch of the ocean. We enjoy less rolling which is great for sleep. Wind is stronger than forecasts; so we power along with 7-8 knots to our goal at Bridgetown. We are a bit South of a straight line, which I don't mind as the winds are meant to be stronger to the South and we will get a better wind angle if the winds veer East, as they are supposed to as we near the West Indies. Probably still a Saturday arrival for us!
Yesterday our universe shifted from Azure blue to "local authority" grey every few hours; from stifling hot conditions under the sun to refreshing tropical drizzle. More variation to our day than previously experienced! We were riding the squalls towards the goal; as the wind picked up debating whether wind shifts were merely temporary or whether it was worthwhile to gybe. Nevertheless, we had our worse daily run of 138.4 nautical miles and the first one below 150. We are now also explicitly logging our hourly runs; the worst so far was 3.5 nautical miles yesterday morning!
It is interesting how the crew start to specialise in areas of talent and interest. Not surprisingly, Hans is our onboard meteorologist and "squall guru" and Peter more surprisingly has become the "minder" of the temperamental Fischer Panda generator. Peter said to Hans last night that he was happy dish washing as "Pareto optimal" specialisation pointed to him doing that while Hans used his other (greater?) skills cooking. In all this, my "Pareto optimal" specialisation seeemed to be shifting non-organic garbage to its stowage place in the anchor locker.
This trip has (so far, touch wood) not brought any challenging conditions weather wise nor any physical hardships. I referred to it with the Swedish term "butter sailing" in an email to a friend earlier tonight. We have every year enjoyed (?) much worse conditions in the North Sea and English Channel. We settled in extremely well as a crew and into the routine of driving the boat 24 hours a day. When I am pondering about it; I think the challenge is more to be away for a relatively long time offshore without any break and any possibility for outside help. We have developed an efficient routine. We have learnt a lot from the need to be self reliant. We have also learnt a lot about planning (checks, spares, supplies etc) and finding reliable solutions and back ups. It is sharpening your mind to know that we are on our own. It has become clear what works and what doesn't on this boat. Never before had things been tested in a such a sustained amount of time. In the past, we always returned to "laboratory conditions" at the dock quickly.
I have dreamt about a trip like this for thirty years. I suddenly remembered the other day, that I used to write fictional sailing accounts in my early teens. I was inspired by the sailing accounts that I read; Naomi James, Robin Knox Johnston, Francis Chichester, Alec Rose and all the early participants of the OSTAR "Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race" including Eric Tabarly and the very well written books by the Swede Ake Mattsson. The "sailing fiction" I wrote, was in a way just like this blog; how conditions changed and I changed sails etc. It now feels like an incredible gift to be given this opportunity to experience the ocean under sail in real life.
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