October 24, 2007

The Good Parts
Two nights ago I was thinking of all the beautiful things to describe in my email. The day had been spectacularly sunny and bright, with a gentle breeze on the beam. That kept us tolerably cool, moved Sequester easily over the moderate sea, and allowed the wind vane to steer flawlessly. We're really pleased with the new trim tab I made at Also Island, and the vane we put together in Savusavu. It's the best the system has ever worked. We could just let her sail herself for hours at a time while I cleaned the carpets, Karen reworked the chart storage, and we both did some light reading. That night the conditions continued, with a nearly clear sky, a 3/4 moon, and a million brilliant stars. I could watch each little cloud move across the sky as an irregular black place on the face of the milky way. I didn't want to use up the batteries too much, and throw off my night vision by running the computer at night, so I let it wait. By morning the sea had gotten quite sharp, and it was hard to focus on reading and typing. Then, early last night the rain squalls started marching through. Each one first stops the wind entirely, so the windvane won't work, and the autopilot has no steerage. As the boat rotates randomly the autopilot throws a fit, the beeper goes off, and it goes on standby. Then the rain comes, with heavy cloud blotting out the sky, and circulating wind clocking through the compass points as the squall passes over, taking anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. I finally decided the best thing to do was to lash the tiller and put all the sail away, and just sit dead waiting until steady wind came back. But each squall starts its own little choppy wave train. So, no lazing around. Can't leave her on her own for more than a couple of minutes. It made for a long night, and continued until early afternoon. Now it starts to look more steady, and the sea is smoother. Hope this holds. We were getting pretty far west of our rhumb line, and wanted a change anyway, so we tacked to a NE course a couple hours ago. May tack back about dusk. Now that things have settled some, it's not too bad, as beating to windward goes. But there's a reason they made up the term "beating". Time to get the navigation info together for the Pacific Seafarers Net. Always fun to hear how the rest of the fleet is doing, from California to Indonesia. And we always listen up just in case Don gets a great propagation day and can say hello to us from Canton, Ohio. Ted