Day 21 -- Growing pains
09 December 2010 | 300 nm from St. Lucia
Peter
We are about 300 nm from St. Lucia. Of course, we will need to sail a longer course than that as we gybe on changes in the wind direction to get us there. That means we are looking at about 2.5 - 3 days out. The wind has lightened into the 10-15k range. After racking up over 4 days in the 180+ nm range, life aboard is starting to slow down.
What that means is I, and I think most of the crew, have hit that point in our sojourn where we wonder if we will ever arrive! I mean, I would swear St. Lucia has moved westward several miles over the past couple of days!! But we have weathered some critical points in our passage and now the certainty of a landfall brings with it the unfulfilled anticipation over the next few days.
Because the wind has lightened, we have shaken out all of our reefs. For the past week it seems like we haven't had to change a thing -- double-reefed man and jib with occasional tweaks to how much jib we furl out. But the past 24 hours has seen a plethora of sail activity. First, we shook out the 2nd reef to the 1st reef. Then we noticed that the two main slugs that had pulled out over a week ago had grown to three slugs. The third slug was a slide for the batten. That is pretty important as it takes a fair amount of loading. So we made the decision to drop the main mid-ocean to make the repairs. "An ounce of prevention..." and all that.
While I was sewing new webbing on that connects the slug to the sail, Tim was busy reriveting the gooseneck plate to the mast. I have these humongous 1/4" rivets holding the plate on. But since they are only aluminum, some working has to be expected. So it took us about 45 minutes to effect the repairs. While we were making the repairs we were sailing under just the jib. We were making pretty good way -- about 6k VMG. So when we got done with the repairs we decided to give everyone a break and keep the main down for a few hours.
That worked for an hour or so. But I was uncomfortable with the rolling motion. But I was also having a bad day because I was so tired, so I let the plan ride. Towards the evening we agreed to get the main back up with no reef. No sooner had we done that than we realized it was just too much sail with nightfall coming on. Generally speaking we want to crowd sail in the morning and during the day, and reduce sail in the evening and during the night. So the decision was made to put in the first reef (again).
Each time we do one of these maneuvers it means turning the boat nearly head to wind and jumping forward to the mast while others in the cockpit work the lines. It all went quite smoothly, but it was also tiring.
The writing is starting to appear on the wall that we brought a switchblade to this bazooka fight race-wise. We are sitting mid-fleet, and unless these other guys put in a ton of hours, then it is likely that is where we will stay. I'll chat about the possible reasons in the next blog. Stay tuned!