Today was an interesting day. The forecast conditions were NW winds at 15-20 knots, seas 6 feet. The reality turned out to be a little different...


[Eric on watch under the dodger]

This morning at about 9 am we crossed the 42nd parallel, which separates Oregon and California. Shortly after we crossed into California, the long-awaited NW winds filled in--with gusto! We cruised downwind in 20 knots of wind, sailing wing-on-wing with our genoa poled out, and a boat speed of 8-10 knots.


[Wing on wing!]

This was great for awhile, but then the wind and seas kept building, until the wind was 25-35 knots and the seas became steep, confused, breaking 15-footers. What had begun as a fun downwind sleigh ride soon became a situation in which we really needed to shorten sail. Not much fun to be doing on deck in those conditions. But what else can you do? So we tethered ourselves to the jacklines and other sturdy holds near the places we were working, and set about shortening sail.

The next little while was an adventure by Mark Twain's standards: "An adventure is something that when you were in it, you wish you weren't."

When we were done, we'd dropped the main and left the genoa up without the pole, so it could jibe freely, as our course was almost dead downwind.

The weather conditions were *forecast* to be better a bit closer to land, so we veered a bit toward shore and held on. We spent the rest of the day pitching and rolling and surfing down steep, confused, breaking waves. Crazy!

At one point, Eric was sitting in the cockpit, and some dolphins came surfing down the wave right next to him. Over and over. Very cool!

After a few hours heading more SE toward shore, the conditions hadn't changed appreciably, but we had become comfortable with them, so we decided to head south again and just suck it up.

Leela, our trusty windpilot, did a yeoman's job of steering through all that mess. Scoots handled all of this just fine; she'd probably seen conditions a lot more gnarly than these in her travels. But it was all new to Eric and me. I think we did fine, too.


[Leela steering in crazy seas. Waves always look smaller in pictures...]

For the first part of my 10 pm-1 am watch, as we passed offshore of Cape Mendocino, the seas were still pitched and confused. Then, at about midnight, as if someone threw a switch, the wind died. Just stopped. Leela, our windpilot, steered us in a circle, looking for the lost wind. Not finding it, she gave up.

Suddenly, we were bobbing in one place, after spending the past eighteen hours in boisterous conditions. That's the ocean for you.

I turned on the engine and engaged Bender, our electronic autopilot, who beeped loudly, gave an error message about the rudder, and returned to standby mode. Not good. This meant we'd have to hand steer until either the wind came back and we could use Leela again, or until Bender's issue was diagnosed and fixed.

When I went off watch at 1 am, the wind still hadn't materialized, and a light drizzle had begun. Conditions were similar when I relieved Eric at the wheel at 4 am.

During my watch, I noticed that the steering seemed a little wonky, and tried some experiments to try to diagnose what the problem might be. When Eric came on deck at 7 am, we talked about what I'd found, and what he'd been thinking, and together we kept trying to figure out what was going on.

The symptoms were that the wheel pulled hard to port, and was sort of difficult to steer to starboard. It felt, to me, as if there was some sort of prop wash against the rudder. Bender couldn't work with the rudder the way it was.

Eric went into the engine room to check everything he could from there, the motor whirred, the rudder moved, It all seemed to be fine. So we started experimenting...

One of the experiments we tried was to turn off the engine and see if the prop wash symptom stopped. It did. Then, I let go of the wheel. When I did, what happened was weird: the wheel spun quickly all the way to port, then all the way to starboard a couple of times. (Normally it's completely balanced and doesn't move.) We tried engaging Bender, but he still gave us the error message.

Then, I steadied the wheel and we tried engaging Bender again...he worked! And the steering was OK now. As if it had healed itself. A mystery to be solved!

The current hypothesis is that something was snagged on the rudder, causing it to pull one way, and that when we stopped moving, it loosened and fell off.

So that was our Friday.