Heading further south along the coast.
25 September 2015 | 14 14.144S:047 49.485E
sunny and warm
The anchor was up again today at 0800 with Night Fly leaving about 90 minutes ahead of us. They are a smaller boat and have had problems with their sails and rigging so they can't put out all their sails. We loaned them our forestaysail so we will be using our "storm jib" instead. It was made back when Zephyr was and by the look of it, has never been used. It's in perfect shape. We hoisted the main sail as we left the anchorage and rolled out the genoa sail on the bow once we started heading south along the coast. Strangely, the wind is coming from the northwest instead of the east as is the usual. Only about four knots so we are just ghosting along at 3.3 which given Zephyr's weight is really quite good. I chalk it up to the nice clean bottom having cleaned her just before we left Russian Bay. For fun, we also pulled up the "storm jib" to see how she flies. While small, it did give us a bit more boost in our speed. We will see how the winds go during the rest of the day. Hopefully a bit more. After much discussion, we finally pulled into a space along the shore that gave us some protection from the winds and swell that was running through the bay. We'd looked at another small cove on the north side but it was full of mangove trees and didn't really give any shelter plus the wind was going in the mouth of the cove having shifted to come out of the west during the day, making it hazardous to anchor there. The winds today slowly built from just about zero when we pulled up the anchor to a good 17 knots as the afternoon progressed. Our speed slowly built throughout the day till we were hitting in the mid 6 knot range to over 8 knots most of the late afternoon. Night Fly had taken a route that took them farther away from shore. Their leaving early didn't gain them much as there was darn little wind during the morming. They were forced to motor a bit of the day. We used our engine to get out of the bay we had anchored in and then turned it off. The morning winds were only about 5 knots at best but we managed to get a decent 3+ knots of boat speed out of it. We treaked all the sails through the day, pulling them in and letting them out and adjusting the blocks that control the sheet angle to the sail and she did just fine. The genoa sail is by far the power sail of the boat so we let her take over and really drive us along. We turned on the Hydrovane and let him steer the boat while the DuoGen running behind the boat made some amps for the batteries. Doing over 6 knots for so long, it does just fine at production since it was rebuilt in the Seychelles. Nice to have it working again. We did about 36 miles today leaving at 0800 and got in 7 hours later. That makes us doing an average of just over 5 knots per hour. With the winds so light this morning and just about perfect this afternoon(right out of the west) we did quite well. Night Fly continued on to Nosy Saba about another 15 miles farther down the coast. They were having great winds where they were and wanted to take advantage of them for as long as they could. Now we get to play catchup tomorrow. --------------050303070903090206020003--