May 5, 2009

May 5, Morning
A few minutes ago I did the log entry for midnight, rolling over from the 4th to the 5th. The night watch is easy so far tonight, with a blanket of high cirrus cloud that diffuses the light from a growing half moon. The sea is a dark grey, with silver from the horizon up, darker patches where low clouds drift west, and the occasional point of light where a star or planet shines through the cirrus. This is what's called a "mackerel sky", with the clouds giving the sky a textured look like fish scales.
This morning at 05:00 we got a last blast from the inter tropical convergence zone, in the form of a vicious squall at the dark end of Karen's watch. I woke up hearing her putting away the jib, and knew there must be a black cloud coming. The wind and rain hit simultaneously, so loud she couldn't hear me ask if she needed a hand in the cockpit. She looked pretty busy though, with 40 knots of breeze making the steering hard, and no way to see how the sails were setting. We got the boat steering with a combination of the wind vane and the electronic autopilot, I threw a light on the sails, and then clipped on a harness and went up to drop the mainsail. The staysail alone was plenty for the next hour, until the squall blew out. Since then we've had easterly breezes , less than 10 knots, so we're making an easy ride at just under 5. Knowing there are strong west setting currents around Kiribati, we opted to stay a bit east of our ideal track, which puts us now about 50 miles west of Tarawa; Latitude 02 deg. 20 min N, longitude 171 deg. 40 min E.
Karen enjoys these light days, when she can read in the cockpit. She still can't tolerate much time in the cabin, beyond navigation duties and sleeping. It's pretty stuffy in here, with the hatches all closed up. But we know from experience, if you open hatches, eventually some sneaky wave will jump on the cabin top, and leave the accommodation wet and salty. We'll live with stuffy, and keep all the electronics dry.
I had a hard time connecting with Sailmail and Winlink yesterday, with a high noise level. That would be serious if it continued, and I started to suspect my antenna system, so I dug around the bilge and came up with a spool of wire (a gift from Bernie about 3 years ago) some coaxial wire and connectors, and my old, cheap manual tuner. After a couple hours with tools and wire and solder scattered everywhere I had a rudimentary delta loop antenna, which Karen helped me rig to a flag halyard and wire through the port side to the old tuner, near the radio. I spent a few minutes testing response, and then checked to see if anyone was up early for the Pacific Seafarers Net, so I could do a signal check. By 2:30 I heard Randy in Hawaii talking to a friend in Alabama, and called in for a comparison of my automatic tuned antenna and the new manual one. The guy in Alabama said there was practically no difference between antenna outputs. 50 feet of wire and a 20 year old, $100 tuner will go a long way! Then, on the chance that Don Lebo might be on frequency I asked Randy to give him a call. He came back right away, clear from Canton, Ohio. Unfortunately Canton must have been just the wrong distance for me, as Don couldn't get a clear signal from me, but it was very nice to hear him. Eventually everything will line up for us to have a conversation, as we did daily while we crossed the Pacific in 2001.
The antenna didn't improve the sailmail, but by evening the noise level had dropped, and I made a clean contact. I rolled the delta loop antenna up and stowed it, for just in case, and we hope the problem stays fixed. No clue what the issue was.....sunspots, solar flares??? Radio waves are part magic anyway.
In about 5 hours now the propagation chart says I should be able to contact either a sailmail or a winlink station in Australia, NZ, or French Polynesia, so I'll put this away for now and go watch the sea. With luck this will go out in the morning with my weather chart requests. Ted